“Never done much for me”: The rock icons that never clicked for Angus Young
Music doesn’t always need to be complicated, and AC/DC know that better than most. It’s this simple idea upon which their entire brand is founded. While this is often attributed to the music itself, which is a back-to-basics rendering of the band’s favourite rock ‘n’ roll sounds pushed through their personal prisms with a heavy emphasis on energy and the swing of the hi-hats, it also applies to the lyrical content.
As AC/DC emerged in the mid-1970s, their sound was in part a reaction to the ostentatious, often fantastical themes of the biggest bands of the day, such as the prog-rock groups and Led Zeppelin and, on the other hand, whatever drug-fuelled nonsense The Rolling Stones were churning out. This anchored the band spiritually, and later in the decade, their frontman, Bon Scott, would also tear into a musical phenomenon from the other side of the spectrum: punk. He saw the wave of angry, leather-clad youths as irrelevant and suggested that their explicitly political spirit was utterly hollow, with it a classic case of style over substance.
“I see us as music; I see punk rock as nothing,” he said. “They’re making a statement you know, it don’t mean nothing, but they’re making a statement.”
People often get the wrong idea about AC/DC; they have more of a philosophy than most. Not only were they open about hating bands such as Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, with their lead guitarist Angus Young dismissing both world-famous outfits as he thought they become pale imitations of themselves to the point where they’d play live for three hours and bore the audience, but they also had punk in their crosshairs.
It’s interesting that people often celebrate punk for wanting to refresh rock and get back to its swaggering basics, but AC/DC were already on that train years before the movement emerged out of the pub rock scene. However, they distanced themselves from it, and as Young explained, punks “were locked into selling anarchy, like a political thing”. The whole concept of AC/DC was a hard-rocking good time to forget the bullshit of the outside world.
AC/DC pride themselves on being real, and the only time they’ve gotten anything like political is on ‘Moneytalks’ from 1990’s The Razors Edge. According to Young, the band wrote about how money, greed, and lust had become the virtues of the day thanks to Reaganomics and the Yuppie mentality.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 1992, it was put to Young that the song was the closest to being explicitly political in their oeuvre. He was then asked what he thought of bands like U2, who concentrated heavily on societal issues. Understandably, given their messaging and ethos, which developed out of punk, he said, “They’ve never done much for me”.
Young explained: “They’ve never done much for me. I think when people go to a rock show they don’t want to hear the latest news round-up summarised in a song. And to get out there and bash them over the head politically, I’ve never been fond of it.”
Young even doubted if such messaging could be done subtly. For him, when Bob Dylan stopped being political and went more surreal in 1965’s Bringing It All Back Home, that was enough for him in this realm; no one could ever top ‘The Bard’. There’s also a reason AC/DC never play benefits like Live Aid; they just don’t think the likes of ‘Highway to Hell’ and ‘Back in Black’ would be taken in the proper context.
