HE 👏 WENT 👏 LOOKING 👏 FOR 👏 TROUBLE 👏
The euros fail to consider the form: it’s not Johnny’s hubris that is the subject of the song. It’s the devil’s, who thinks his power is worth more than simple love for a craft
motherfucker there is a wholeass subcategory of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index for stories about winning against the Devil
EVERYONE loves a good "very powerful, very evil, very smug dude gets his ass handed to him by an underdog that he massively underestimated" story.
and for as long as there have ever been stories about Supernatural Evil Entities That You Absolutely Shouldn't Fuck With, there have been stories about Okay But What If You Did Fuck With The Supernatural Evil And It Went Great, Actually. sometimes the supernatural evil entity is Literally The Devil, Yes That One, because those story frameworks already existed and it was super easy to slot the Devil into them once he came along.
idk what other cultures you're thinking of here but "what if we challenged the darkness and the darkness blinked first" was not a concept no one ever dared explore until Americans thought of it.