Fandoms & Feminism

It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.

The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.

But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.

It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.

Bluntly: Standards.

Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.

But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.

All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap. 

Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.

Care.

See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.

The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.

(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)

Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.

But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.

Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it's made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible -- not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.

BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel's song:

Fire on the Mountain, run, Boy, run. Devil's in the House of the Rising Sun. Chicken's in the bread pan, pickin' out dough. Granny, Will Your Dog Bite? No, child, no.

Fire on the mountain (some eye contact):

House of the Rising Sun (some eye contact):

Chicken in the bread tray (pan):

Granny, will your dog bite?

Like one day they're having a watch party or something, and ratthi will look over, stare at murderbot for a second, then say in a surprised voice, "oh, i didn't know that secunits' organic parts age the way humans do!"

Murderbot is quiet for a few seconds as it studies itself from one of its drone cameras, sees the fine wrinkles starting to line the skin of its face. Then it says in a wondering voice, "I didn't know that either. We usually don't live long enough to experience significant changes to our appearance."

And then an explosion happens on the display and murderbot goes back to paying attention to its show while all the humans around it stare at each other in abject horror. Arada's on the verge of tears and wants to hug murderbot so badly. Instead, she just hides her face in Overse's shoulder.

All Systems Red

...Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.

Artificial Condition

Even when I was still in armor, once my PreservationAux clients had seen my human face, they had wanted to treat me like a person.

I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this.

It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.

Since I wasn’t a person and I didn’t have an employment voucher, I would have to hack my way into one of the supply shuttles …

Rogue Protocol:

You would think the person they knew as a security consultant slamming in and disarming one of them would cause everyone to stop and reassess their priorities in this situation, but oh, you would be wrong.

Exit Strategy

“It’s the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.”

[...]

A roving drone cam showed me she was frowning. “You are a person.”

Oh, that we can’t talk about. “Not legally.”

Fugitive Telemetry

But I wasn’t a citizen and also technically not actually a person, which made it more difficult.

Network Effect