Failure™ Magazine

AC/DC: The Songs Remain the Same

AC/DC Rejects Change, Finds Continued Success.

Written by Greg Beato   Filed under Arts & Entertainment

Are you tired of change? Are you fed up with extreme makeovers and disruptive innovation? In a world overdosing on frantic novelty, are you perfectly happy thinking inside the bun? You may feel guilty about your lack of ambition, your indifference to life coaches, plastic surgeons, spiritual handymen and Oprah-certified hucksters who promise dynamic transformation. You may feel alone and out of step, defective in a world that prizes self-improvement above all else. But at least you still have AC/DC, the patron saints of high-voltage complacency.

Thirty-five years into a career that has seen less innovation than Fidel Castro’s beard, the Aussie rockers are at the top of the Billboard charts. The band sold 784,000 copies of its new album, Black Ice, in its first week of release. They’ve just embarked on an 18-month world tour. And Wal-Mart, the only place you can buy the new album, has apparently put housewares and ladies underthings in storage for the moment and created a special department exclusively for them.

These days, one needn’t look far to see the bodies of those done in by the failure to keep pace with rapidly changing times. Newspapers and magazines continue to implode. Independent bookstores and record shops are as rare as blacksmiths and cobblers. Floppy disks, rap rock, Bear Stearns, we hardly knew ye. Meanwhile, AC/DC is thriving, and thriving for precisely the same reason so many other entities are failing: Because it has made absolutely no effort to update its skill-set, embrace new technologies, or revise its core mission to better suit contemporary consumer desires.

In 1974, on its first recordings with lead singer Bon Scott, everything that would define AC/DC was already in place: The kicked-in-the-groin vocals, the punk-like rhythm section, the kind of bombastic guitar solos that would never show up on a Ramones album, and choruses that sounded as if they were sung by a bleacher’s worth of sullen soccer fans.

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