What is the AC/DC song ‘Back in Black’ about?
With its sucker punch of a power riff smacking us across the ears from the get-go, the 1980 AC/DC number ‘Back in Black’ became an instant classic, perhaps defining the hard rock genre better than any song before or since. Add to its signature three-chord start-up a belter of a Brian Johnson chorus and a surging Angus Young guitar solo, and it’s easy to see why the song’s also transcended both the band and their anthemic form of rocking out.
Singer Johnson worked tirelessly in the studio to perfect his vocals on the track, especially since it was one of the first songs he’d written and recorded with Angus and Malcolm Young since the death of previous AC/DC frontman Bon Scott. In fact, Scott was the inspiration behind ‘Back in Black’, as the Young brothers wanted a song that paid tribute to their former bandmate.
“The guys wanted it to be a good rock record in memory of Bon,” Johnson explained to NME in 2020, “but without all the slather, without all the mulch and the crap that usually goes with that.” Sentimentality wasn’t exactly a rock and roll way to deal with grief, and a gooey power ballad was hardly the band’s way of doing things in any case.
At the same time, Johnson has previously described how avoiding something “morbid” was part of his writing brief, too. The song couldn’t get too bleak. It had to be “a celebration” of Scott’s life.
And so, Johnson set about eulogising his predecessor’s propensity for living on the edge. Scott the human body beyond its limits in the name of hedonism, seemingly cheating death until he eventually succumbed to his lifestyle. Hence, the lyrical starting point for ‘Back in Black’ was the couplet “I got nine lives / Cat’s eyes”.
From this metaphor, words started flowing about all the ways a drug-fuelled rock star was evading the Grim Reaper. Scott’s band chose to subvert a song supposed to be about his untimely demise by focusing solely on the miracle escape act he seemed to be performing in the years before it.
So, what does the song’s title mean?
If the point of ‘Back in Black’ is that the band refuses to accept the dark side of death, the song’s central metaphor of being “in black” seems a funny way of making it. The truth is, however much celebratory revelry is going on in the song, Scott’s musical brothers were still mourning him. As Angus Young later admitted, It was like losing a member of your family.
Johnson may sing about being “loose from the noose” and tell the world to “forget the hearse”, but Scott’s death still happened. His bandmates might be laughing in the face of death on the song, but recording months after the tragedy was still extremely raw.
Although the majority of the song’s lyrics are full of devil-may-care abandon, its title is a clear allusion to Scott’s passing. The Young brothers consciously and deliberately chose ‘Back in Black’ as the title track for the band’s new album even before it was completed. “They wanted the album to be black,” Johnson said. AC/DC were back and better than ever, but they were also dressed in black, given the elephant in the room.
The song and the album are marks of respect that the group was paying to their late friend and frontman in the best way they knew how. Still, hard rock’s biggest band didn’t do downbeat. However much they missed Scott, it was their duty to send him off in a blaze of guitar blasts and vocal shrieks that only they could muster.
