The one genre Angus Young never enjoyed: “We could never really pose”
There wasn’t anyone who was going to mistake AC/DC for any other genre the minute Angus Young played his first riffs.
They were rock and roll to their very core from the minute they started playing, and if you were to look up the definition of what the genre was in the dictionary, seeing Young in a schoolboy uniform with a guitar in his hands is one of the first things that appears, aside from Slash’s top hat and Mick Jagger’s tongue. But even if rock and roll has spread out a lot more since Young started, that didn’t mean he needed to be in love with everything that he heard with a roaring guitar.
Before the band even fully got started, they already had a clear idea of what they wanted their music to sound like. They had grown up on the same roaring songs that Chuck Berry and Little Richard used to invent rock and roll, and while Young would typically play a lick that was reminiscent of someone like Muddy Waters or Buddy Guy, it was always in service to making the meanest grooves the rock world had ever seen.
Because if you think about it, there’s almost a funkiness to the way that the band plays. They weren’t exactly in the same league as George Clinton or Sly Stone by any means, but the rhythm is what matters the most in all great AC/DC tunes. Anyone could play their tracks note-for-note and be technically correct, but if there isn’t something weighing down the rest of the band whenever those riffs kick in, it’s not going to matter nearly as much as the real thing.
They were technically a rock band, but it’s called rock and roll for a reason. That signature roll in all of AC/DC’s song is the reason why they never really had to change their style throughout decades in the music industry, but if you wanted to see what it looked like when all of the groove was sucked out of a band, Young only needed to look at the kinds of bands that littered the Sunset Strip in the 1980s.
There wasn’t a single person with a guitar at that time who wouldn’t have called AC/DC a primary influence, but a lot of them ended up sounding like AC/DC without any of the swagger. People like Guns N’ Roses managed to bring the groove back into rock and roll towards the end of the decade, but it’s not like Young was exactly itching to be on the same channels as bands like Whitesnake or Winger whenever they came onscreen.
And it wasn’t like Young was above taking the piss out of them more than a few times as well, saying, “I think we were far away from the heavy metal thing, cuz they’re all quite similar a lot of the time. They’ve all got these preplanned footsteps and they’ve always got the blonde guy and the drummer that always smiles at the camera. So for us, we can only be ourselves. That’s how we are. We could never really pose. We were never a pose-y sort of band.”
That didn’t stop record companies from trying to market the new kids like hard rock boy bands half the time. Some of the final hair metal bands seemed like the epitome of assembly line acts, and even if they had a few half-decent tunes between them, it didn’t matter so long as they looked like they were wearing whatever hand-me-downs that Poison was too cool to wear at the time.
If anything, the fact that grunge came in and eliminated all of those bands was only a good thing in Young’s books. There had been far too much mediocrity from people who looked the part, and now was the time to remind everyone what rock could sound like if it was played by people who actually seemed to care.
