The silliest classic rock song ever written
We all love a good laugh, don’t we? Even the most stone-faced individuals and upstanding members of society among you know how to have a chuckle at the most base-level comedy from time to time. Hell, even my prim-and-proper grandmother was partial to a bit of potty humour every now and then, so if she can summon a smirk out of something so crass, then I’m sure you can find it within yourself, too.
However, when you think about humour in music, some people might wince at the idea of cracking a few jokes in a song or immediately think about novelty songs that cause more eye-rolls than giggles. There are also some songs that are funny without intending to be, perhaps due to excessive earnestness or due to it being so over the top that it becomes something of a laughing stock.
But sometimes a band just knows what they’re doing and can weave humour into their very being. Although classic rock is often seen to be much more serious than other genres, there have been some prime examples of jokesters in the scene.
One band who knew how to produce more than a wry smirk out of their audience was AC/DC, and even though they knew how to rock out better than most, they still found a way to integrate their daft Australian charm into their work. Just take one look at guitarist Angus Young, known for donning an ill-fitting school uniform on stage, something that he still does to this day despite his looks making it a lot harder to pass as a 14-year-old. It’s silly, but it works, and it’s incredibly typical of the band’s sense of humour.
Sat in the middle of one of their two classic 1976 albums, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, is a song so unabashedly dumb, puerile, and snicker-worthy that it warrants the title of ‘the silliest classic rock song of all time’. ‘Big Balls’ is AC/DC at their least subtle, and even though there are multiple attempts to disguise the true subject of the song early on in the track, the lyrics become even more ludicrously lewd as they go on.
Bon Scott spends a lot of the song quite predictably boasting about the grandeur of his ‘balls’, which in the earliest instance you could mistake for socialite parties if you were really naive, but the double entendres start coming thick and fast as the song progresses before it reaches a point where there’s no point in him trying to hide the fact that he’s on about his family jewels. It’s the needless references to how they’re ‘dirty’ and how they ‘bounce’, and the oddly shoehorned-in nod to Jerry Lee Lewis’ great and fiery balls that keep the laughs coming.
But it’s not just the bawdy lyrical content that makes the track so silly, as from the word go, Scott is adopting a ropey faux-British RP accent that is just as laughable as the subject matter. Listening back to this now, his bizarre vocal affectation is akin to a proto-Geordie Greep, someone who you also wouldn’t be surprised to hear singing about big balls on his most recent material.
The outro to the song is also a fine example of its humour as well, which sees the band make one last-ditch attempt to clear up the subject of the song with backing vocals chanting “bollocks, knackers”. But as their ruse falls apart, so does the song structure, culminating almost in an anti-ending of sorts where the typically tight guitar playing of the band falls to slop rather than ending on an emphatic stab of a power chord.
It’s all in the name of fun with AC/DC, and this is undoubtedly them at their silliest. Plus, it’s impressive that they manage to make a dick joke last almost three minutes – which is longer than most would last, I suppose.
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