Rob Masters

The old gag goes "We have both kinds of music here - Country and Western". Well, I don't usually have a lot of time for either.  This song is an exception, and it was always a crying shame it never got a decent video, until 19 years later, when a band that I also rarely have a lot of time for did a cover.  And the confluence of genres, song, band, and video combined to create something vastly greater than any one of the parts. Enjoy "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by Primus from 1998.

Ok, time for a big jump back through time. The year is 1977, and Star Wars has just come out. Around the same time, a sound engineer's collaboration with a songwriter had just released their second album. Their first album explored the dark writings of a gothic writer and essayist. This one looked at the likelihood of robots and AIs ultimately subjugating and/or replacing us as the dominant life-form.  Originally inspired by the works of Asimov, they could not get the rights to one of his most famous stories, and so they were freed from the Three Laws and their essential optimism. To solve the lack of rights, a simple punctuation change was employed. They deleted a comma. I am talking about the second album by The Alan Parsons Project, 'I Robot'. APP's first commercial success at the time (Tales of Mystery and Imagination did not sell well until some years after release), it went platinum, and effectively launched the project's on-going success. This video is ... lo...