the first round

(9) cw mccall, “convoy”
rocked
(8) falco, “rock me amadeus”
130-121
and will play on in the second round

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 6.

jonathon reinhardt on “rock me amadeus”

Vienna, Austria is a good place to be dead. Both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Hölzel, better known as Falco, are buried there, one remembered for his musical legacy to all of humanity, and the second, for a frenetically syncopated 1980s pop song about the first. Both were young when they passed—Wolfgang was 35 and Johann was 41—having led the hard lives that musicians always do, no matter their century. But until Falco, the modern world had sort of forgotten Mozart was Austrian and associated its music with a certain 1965 American musical, much to the annoyance of Salzburg tour guides, who were more often asked to point out where Do-Re-Mi was sung than where Mozart was born. No, Edelweiss was not the national anthem, the real anthem was written by Mozart, yes, those are the steps where Liesl and Ralf danced.
But in 1985, people started asking about lieber Wolfi again, thanks to Milos Forman, who in 1984 filmed a great movie about Mozart in Prague, since it still looks like 18th century Vienna, which had the shit bombed out of it in WWII. Amadeus was a huge hit, and little problematic Austria finally had the opportunity to be proud of something, one of it sons even, drawing attention away from the son it was embarassed about, the one everyone assumes is German, the one who can be blamed for the bombing, the one whom Julie Andrews reminded everyone about. Falco, rocked by Amadeus, captured this moment of national pride and justified a bit of self-forgiveness.
There is something anxious and urgent about the song. The staccato-esque glottal stops that typify German pronunciation (in English, a glottal stop is the difference between ‘uh-oh’ and ‘a ho’) add a weird, machine-gun like cadence to it, which, combined with the rather simplistic octaval alternations of the chorus, make it seem off to many English rock-accustomed ears. As any non-European viewer of the Euro-vision song contest realizes, the syncopation in much Euro-pop, especially from the 1980’s, is clumsy. It seems awkward and even a little silly. The effect of it in Rock Me Amadeus, however, is almost like heavy-footed marching, and combined with its minor key, repeated over and over with an occassional wail, it’s almost carnevalesque, like a new-wave funeral procession. A synth-pop dirge if you will, celebrating death.
I studied German in the 80s, and answered Falco’s second global hit, Vienna Calling by spending my junior year, 1987-88 near Vienna, during which I heard Falco quite often exhorting me to remember what a superstar Mozart was. He was a punk, he lived in the great city of Vienna, where he did it all, he was in debt because he drank and all women loved him and called to him come on and rock me Amadeus. I was there again in 1991, coincidentally the 200th anniversary of Mozart’s death. Everywhere I turned there was a Mozart concert, cheap or free, playing everything he ever wrote, along with the regular concerts of Strauss, Brahms, Haydn, and dozens of other composers, making the city the Hollywood of classical music. But Mozart was the superstar, he was popular and exalted because he had flair—it was clear why Falco would be jealous, why he’d try to emulate him. And all over the country, Mozartkugeln, or Mozart balls, were on sale at every candy and souvenir shop and café. These balls were prolific, the rockstar object of desire of so many women and men, and everyone wanted them. It was as if their delicious, marzipan and nougat-filled sweetness brought new life, hinting at the superstar’s power to redeem.
Death and reminders of the past are all over Europe, but they seem to be especially poignantly abundant in Austria. Each town has a massive, weirdly beautiful baroque monument to the black death, with golden angels flying among bubo-like clouds. Vienna’s cemeteries are glorious places to stroll around in, and its beautiful Jugendstil art and architecture (Art Nouveau, ironically translating to ‘youth style’) is nothing less than fin-de-siècle goth. The city is a global monument to the virility of the 18th and 19th century Habsburgers, who spread their seeds into every European royal family. This makes it a good place to mourn the dead and be wistful about things like the divine right of kings. When my beloved grandmother back home in the US died while I was there, I wept openly walking through the streets, and all of the imperial splendor, all of the many graveyards, all of the monuments to the dead comforted me. The many elderly of Vienna, sitting on park benches and in church pews, whose faces normally seemed unhappy and slightly bitter, appeared to my mournful eyes full of sympathy, and I felt better. I ate a lot of chocolate that year.
Every place in the world has stories about its founders and its origins that its inhabitants tell themselves over and over to make it special, to create a collective, unique sense of place. Since WWII, Austria and Germany have had to re-imagine their stories in order to re-invent and be able to live with themselves—the Marshall Plan made it mandatory that every German and Austrian history textbook included a clear account of what ‘never again’ meant. Berlin has in some parts been reconfigured as if its history followed some alternate timeline starting in 1910, where Prussia and the Hohenzollern continued on—fine, really, because who has a real opinion about Bismarck or Friedrich the Great anyway. For its part, Vienna mourns its lost empire through the ongoing repetition of its music, as if it will fade forever from human memory if the waltzing ever ends.
Johann Hölzel died in a car crash in 1998 and like Wolfgang Mozart, he died in debt and left many lovers behind. His funeral was a massive affair, with 10,000 mourners—in comparison, imagine 400,000 Americans today showing up for a pop star’s funeral. One 78-year-old mourner, laying roses on his coffin, summed up the national mood telling a reporter, “There was Mozart, Schubert, and Falco”. Falco’s dirge, “Rock Me, Amadeus,” is somehow comforting in its badness. I would not be surprised if Falco balls were offered in 200 years by some Viennese confectioner, filled with chocolate synth-pop, staccato tears. This might have been Falco’s plan all along.

Jon Reinhardt is an Associate Professor of English Applied Linguistics at the U of Arizona. He normally writes about language learning and video games, but he also enjoys 80s synth-pop as well as the music and balls of Mozart. 

michael schaub on “convoy”

I feel safe asserting that out of all the songs in this year’s tournament, “Convoy” is the only one performed by a fictional truck driver. (I am not going to fact check this.) C.W. McCall was the creation of an Omaha ad agency director named William Fries who, in a fit of astounding timing, put out the song at the best possible time—right when the nation was in the grips of CB radio fever, which was a thing; I have no clue why.
Narrated by a rogue truck driver with the handle Rubber Duck, McCall’s song followed a convoy of truckers—starting small, and eventually a thousand strong—that drives from Los Angeles (“Shaky Town”) to the Jersey Shore, ignoring all law enforcement officers (“bears”) who try to stop them. It is heavy with CB/trucker slang (to be honest, I still have no clue what a “cab-over Pete with a reefer on” is), the chorus is cheesy as hell, and the vocals are objectively silly.
But here’s the thing: It doesn’t belong in this tournament. “Convoy” fucking rules. It’s an amazing song.
I don’t remember when I first heard “Convoy,” but it must have been sometime in the early ‘80s, on one of the country stations my dad listened to. Then at some point in middle school, I was listening to the Dr. Demento show (I was that kid) when he played a parody of the song called “Car Phone,” a sendup of the then-new technology and the rich young professionals who could afford it (“He’s got a bitchin’ car phone / He thinks he owns the road / Yeah, he’s got a brand-new car phone / He’s stuck in the yuppie mode.”
For some reason, hearing this truly awful doggerel made me seek out the original, and I was hooked. The ‘70s country I had heard had been pretty bad—countrypolitan singers dressed in unfortunate outfits and pop singers repackaged as salt-of-the-earth country musicians. (I hadn’t heard outlaw country yet.)
The most charming thing about Convoy is McCall’s don’t-give-a-shit attitude toward the whole thing. Nothing about the song makes all that much sense, even if you do understand the trucker lingo. How did they get past the roadblock on the cloverleaf in Tulsa? Are they ever stopping for gas? What’s their plan once they reach the Jersey Shore? And what’s up with the “eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus”?
But McCall sings with such a goofball commitment to the concept that the questions seem beside the point. It’s a hilariously angry song that sees McCall—an ad man from Nebraska—side strongly with the truckers who were mad about … something. (“Swindle sheets,” for one, I guess. Boy, they hated those “swindle sheets”! Also, they weren’t keen on tolls. I’m sure there’s more history about this, but I feel like more context would ruin the song for me. Also, I’m lazy.)
The last stanza of the song is one of my favorites in all of country music: 

Well, we laid a strip for the Jersey shore
And prepared to cross the line
I could see the bridge was lined with bears
But I didn't have a doggone dime
I says, "Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck
We just ain't a-gonna pay no toll
So we crashed the gate doing 98
I says, "Let them truckers roll, 10-4."

The song ends before we figure out what happened next. What happened once they reached the Atlantic? Did they turn themselves in? Were there any legal ramifications? I bet there were legal ramifications! It’s a perfect ending.
Or it would have been, if it weren’t for McCall’s sequel song, “‘Round the World With the Rubber Duck,” which is one of the misbegotten songs in country history. The song picks up with the convoy at the Atlantic Ocean, which they proceed to drive across to England, using the power of prayer (remember the friends of Jesus in the microbus)? The chorus, sung by people attempting to sound like pirates, goes:

Yo ho ho, and a thousand trucks
Gonna take a bath with a Rubber Duck
Yo ho ho, and a-lots o’ luck
'Round the world with the Rubber Ducky!

The rest of the song continues in that vein, with someone (McCall?) doing a variety of bad accents, including English, German, Russian, and Japanese. (I know what you’re thinking, and it’s even more racist than you’re imagining.) Throughout the rest of the song, the backing singers chant, “This is dumb, dumb, dumb,” displaying a pretty impressive sense of self-awareness on McCall’s part.
But even that awful song can’t quite ruin “Convoy” for me. It is to country music what truck-stop Slim Jims are to filet mignon—objectively and aggressively not-the-same-thing, but close enough that you can justify it if you’re skilled at self-delusion. It approaches badness at so many angles that it somehow ends up good, which seems appropriate from a bit of American pop culture from the ‘70s. It’s dated, frequently nonsensical and corny as hell, but I don’t care. I love it. Let them truckers roll, y’all.

Michael Schaub is a journalist and book critic who lives in Texas.