Failure™ Magazine

AC/DC: The Songs Remain the Same

AC/DC Rejects Change, Finds Continued Success.

Written by Greg Beato   Filed under Arts & Entertainment

Over the next six years, AC/DC refined its sound in the same way corporations streamline their logos, via incremental steps all but undetectable to casual observers. Gradually, however, the riffs got louder and more polished, the hooks catchier. And when Scott drank himself to death one night in 1980 and the more pleasingly generic yelper Brian Johnson took his place, the evolutionary phase of the band’s career was complete. AC/DC’s first post-Scott release, Back in Black, was pure sonic Budweiser, and no more R&D was needed. Ever.

Since then, the band’s unshakeable complacency has been awesome to behold. After the tremendous success of Back in Black, they weren’t inspired to create a rock opera, or explore the possibilities of sitars and dulcimers, or collaborate with Brian Eno. When their record sales slowed in the mid 1980s and Rolling Stone was tweaking them for making “the same album nine times,” they didn’t panic and add Flock of Seagulls keyboards in an effort to update their sound. They simply released Fly on the Wall; in other words, more of the same. And every so often—but never too often—they release the same album for the eleventh time, or the twelfth, or whatever it is they’re up to now.

It’s an effective, gracious approach, keeping us interested but not inundated, and, one suspects, it’s harder than it looks. Like many successful artists, AC/DC must have had the kind of epiphany Steve Martin describes in his 2007 memoir, “Born Standing Up,” when he realizes he has perfected his act and is never going to make it any funnier, or more innovative, or more surprising. “I saw that the only way I could go, at best, was sideways,” he writes.

Martin’s response was to quit stand-up and make movies instead. Axl Rose lost himself in a studio for ten years. Jerry Seinfeld temporarily retired. AC/DC, on the other hand, has continued to move sideways, duck-walking to its eternal 4/4 beat. In 35 years, lead guitarist Angus Young has updated his stage persona less often than Miley Cyrus does in a single set. In 35 years, he and his bandmates have never released a Neptunes remix of one of their hits.

No self-help guru will earn a place in Oprah’s heart telling you to stay in a rut and be less productive, yet look at how well this strategy has served AC/DC. They’re incredibly rich. They’re extremely popular. And they appear to be enjoying themselves immensely.

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