Part II: What Is Rock? And Why Is AC/DC So Fucking Good At It?
What I often find most fascinating about rock and roll as a musical movement is the way that it is constantly bullied into representing something greater than itself. Rock’s first iteration, the Bill Haley ’50s, took this musical bastard child and made it speak to the way that an ever-modernizing world was losing control of its children; ’60s rock is epitomized by the hippie mantra of (for the most part) left-wing anti-authoritarian protest; and ’70s rock, for better or worse, took a mainstream take-it-easy hedonism mixed with a world-weary post-Watergate cynicism. It’s important to note here that each time, the meaning drifts further and further from the sound itself, as the shock of the new wears off and audiences become more and more calloused to rock’s eternally youthful urgency. In a sense, once rock was created, it became harder and harder to find, in its purest form.
It can be debated, and I think successfully, that whatever it is that Australian juggernaut AC/DC does is pretty much the most purely distilled essence of what rock and roll actually is; where other giants of rock’s past have littered the decades with a discography filled with excessive indulgence and half-baked ideas, AC/DC have remained monolithically pure and simple. Of course, the crazy thing about rock and roll is how it continually turns on itself; when I think about AC/DC’s consistency and reliability in producing, year in and year out, a predictably solid rock and roll product, I catch that little voice inside of me going “Well, that doesn’t sound very ‘rock and roll.’ ”
Which forces the question: What is “rock and roll”? What do we mean when we say that something is “rock,” or “not very rock and roll”? I think in order seriously to consider this, one has to go back to the concept of the rock band, and how rock bands became what they are today (or at least, what they had become by the late ’60s and early ’70s when AC/DC formed). Joe Carducci, in his seminal-yet-clumsily-written-and-also-oddly-right-wing early ’90s treatise Rock and the Pop Narcotic, put it this way: “Rock music is rock and roll music made conscious of itself as a small band music.” The two operative phrases there are “made conscious” and “small band” — prior to the birth of the modern rock band, musical groups were put together by outside sources, with music biz people coming up with arrangements and matching singers to songs. “Rock,” as we know it, is the backing band’s mutiny of this bloated system, whereby the rhythm section and guitarist found a like-minded singer themselves and told everyone else involved in the whole process to go fuck themselves.
Of course, historical perspective makes this Tea Party-esque overthrow of the Big Biz monarchy more comprehensible: post WWII Baby Boomers with more cash to spend and less time spent tilling the fields were the perfect target demographic for a pop culture explosion; with more people living in cities and with technology making centuries of human existence seem quaintly obsolete, the time was right for a do-over of pop music. If you were young, good looking, and could create a situation where boys could fight with other boys over girls who wanted to throw underwear on your stage, who needs someone else on the band’s payroll arranging songs and hiring musicians? And what do we need other musicians for anyway? Less musicians on stage equals dividing the night’s tally by less.
