CLASSIC(AL): On Ozzy’s “Flying High Again,” Randy Rhoads had mohawked Beethovens and Mozarts headbanging in heaven.
Marnie Stern’s guitar style is notable for the two ways she breaks from the indie-rock-guitar rulebook. She wears her guitar strapped really high up, something that’s frowned on because it looks dorky. And she does a significant amount of two-hand tapping, a practice often shunned as gimmicky by people who hate things that rule.
In fact, two-hand tapping predates the rock-and-roll era. As early as 1952, Jimmy Webster was flogging his allegedly revolutionary “Touch System,” an approach to the instrument that was about as popular with guitarists as Esperanto was with linguists. In the early ’70s, Emmett Chapman began to perfect a tap-friendly guitar/bass hybrid that became the Chapman Stick (an instrument that no one who isn’t named Tony Levin should be allowed to play under any circumstances). But it took the shred-friendly ’80s to allow glimpses of tapping to penetrate pop radio (Exhibit A: Neil Schon’s flourishes in “Don’t Stop Believing”). Here are a handful of highlights from the history of two-hand tapping.
EDDIE VAN HALEN OF VAN HALEN | “ERUPTION” | VAN HALEN [1978] | Ground Zero for tapping. Eddie combines classical rigor and bombastic rock tactics to blow up headsScanners-style with musical awesomeness. Quick, name another track that gets classic-rock radio listeners to throw the devil horns at quotations from Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Etude No. 2.
TONY LEVIN OF KING CRIMSON | “ELEPHANT TALK” | DISCIPLINE [1981] | True, this may be the clarion call that launched a thousand Primuses, but Levin’s skronky fluidity is a sound to behold regardless of your tolerance for prog signifiers.
RANDY RHOADS OF OZZY OSBOURNE | “FLYING HIGH AGAIN” | BARK AT THE MOON[1981] | Few guitarists made classical flourishes sound as rad as RR, and this is arguably his finest moment: from 2:18 to 2:47, he takes a pretty standard rocker and turns it on its head, with mohawked Beethovens and Mozarts headbanging in heaven.
ANGUS YOUNG OF AC/DC | “THUNDERSTRUCK” | THE RAZOR‘S EDGE [1989] | It takes real innovation to come up with a two-hand tapping riff so amazingly bad-ass that you can open up a stadium show with it. “Thunderstruck” synthesizes everything that rules about metal and rock and runs it through a classical meatgrinder, spraying the blood of awesome everywhere in the process.
BRIAN GIBSON OF LIGHTNING BOLT | “CROWN OF STORMS” | WONDERFUL RAINBOW[2003] | The guitar heroes of the ’90s tended to eschew hair-metal techniques like tapping (and practicing, and tuning . . . ), and that makes the return of tap in the hands of this two-person noise ensemble all the more unlikely. Simultaneously childlike, joyous, and furious, Gibson’s tap attack here fits right in with the sensory-overload rock that’s Lightning Bolt’s specialty.
Rock and rote: Three decades in, AC/DC’s conservatism pays off
Part I: Prologue
In my time on this charred rock I’ve met lots of people who fucking love music, and I’ve decided that the vast majority of them fit within two groups, one vastly outnumbering the other. The first group, the minority, is composed of people who really love music but don’t care where it’s from, or how they found it. They are responding to the sound, and the way it hits them, and nothing more. These people retain a certain purity of musical appreciation, and can listen to a song, or any piece of music, and immediately decide whether they like it or not, without questioning whether it is appropriate for them to like it. These people are called “infants.”
Everyone else falls in the other camp: They enjoy music that makes sense to them, and it is often just as important (if not more) for the people that make the music to also make some sense: what kind of music am I about to hear? What sort of audience is this aimed at? What style of music can I expect? What is the desired setting for enjoying this music? I think that there is definitive proof that no band of musicians in the history of the world has more successfully clarified the answers to these questions while still presenting a façade of force and a branding stamp of quality than the Australian group AC/DC.
Contradictory as it might seem for a band whose very name designates ambiguous sexuality (at least in the UK), AC/DC have managed to plow through the complicated emotional detritus of the last half of the 20th century and beyond, jackhammering minimalist anthems into the collective unconscious in a manner redolent of a mass-mind haiku. As the band once sang, in a phrase that is both tautologically retarded and Forrest Gump-ishly profound: “Rock and roll/is just rock and roll.”
AC/DC’s decision to release their new album, Black Ice (Columbia) exclusively to Wal-Mart might actually tip the scale to become the single most conservative moment of the band’s mythology (first will always be, to me, the story of US forces in 1989 getting Manuel Noriega to surrender by blasting Back in Black — although that story is somewhat more apocryphal than true, since a perusal of the actual playlist used by US forces suggests that Noriega’s breaking point could have just as easily been reached with Oingo Boingo’s “Dead Man’s Party” as the soundtrack). “Conservative”? Well, bear with me. I don’t necessarily mean it in a politically-loaded manner (although, quick: name me one band that you can guess Joe the Plumber has at least one disc of in his CD rack); but rock and roll ebbs and flows between radicalism and formalism, right? When rock fans, over the last three decades have had occasion to proclaim, “Enough with the weird stuff!”, they’ve been reliably able to retreat to the warm rocking bosom of AC/DC.
Part II: What Is Rock? And Why Is AC/DC So Fucking Good At It?
What I often find most fascinating about rock and roll as a musical movement is the way that it is constantly bullied into representing something greater than itself. Rock’s first iteration, the Bill Haley ’50s, took this musical bastard child and made it speak to the way that an ever-modernizing world was losing control of its children; ’60s rock is epitomized by the hippie mantra of (for the most part) left-wing anti-authoritarian protest; and ’70s rock, for better or worse, took a mainstream take-it-easy hedonism mixed with a world-weary post-Watergate cynicism. It’s important to note here that each time, the meaning drifts further and further from the sound itself, as the shock of the new wears off and audiences become more and more calloused to rock’s eternally youthful urgency. In a sense, once rock was created, it became harder and harder to find, in its purest form.
It can be debated, and I think successfully, that whatever it is that Australian juggernaut AC/DC does is pretty much the most purely distilled essence of what rock and roll actually is; where other giants of rock’s past have littered the decades with a discography filled with excessive indulgence and half-baked ideas, AC/DC have remained monolithically pure and simple. Of course, the crazy thing about rock and roll is how it continually turns on itself; when I think about AC/DC’s consistency and reliability in producing, year in and year out, a predictably solid rock and roll product, I catch that little voice inside of me going “Well, that doesn’t sound very ‘rock and roll.’ ”
Which forces the question: What is “rock and roll”? What do we mean when we say that something is “rock,” or “not very rock and roll”? I think in order seriously to consider this, one has to go back to the concept of the rock band, and how rock bands became what they are today (or at least, what they had become by the late ’60s and early ’70s when AC/DC formed). Joe Carducci, in his seminal-yet-clumsily-written-and-also-oddly-right-wing early ’90s treatise Rock and the Pop Narcotic, put it this way: “Rock music is rock and roll music made conscious of itself as a small band music.” The two operative phrases there are “made conscious” and “small band” — prior to the birth of the modern rock band, musical groups were put together by outside sources, with music biz people coming up with arrangements and matching singers to songs. “Rock,” as we know it, is the backing band’s mutiny of this bloated system, whereby the rhythm section and guitarist found a like-minded singer themselves and told everyone else involved in the whole process to go fuck themselves.
Of course, historical perspective makes this Tea Party-esque overthrow of the Big Biz monarchy more comprehensible: post WWII Baby Boomers with more cash to spend and less time spent tilling the fields were the perfect target demographic for a pop culture explosion; with more people living in cities and with technology making centuries of human existence seem quaintly obsolete, the time was right for a do-over of pop music. If you were young, good looking, and could create a situation where boys could fight with other boys over girls who wanted to throw underwear on your stage, who needs someone else on the band’s payroll arranging songs and hiring musicians? And what do we need other musicians for anyway? Less musicians on stage equals dividing the night’s tally by less.
These epiphanies had been made before, most recently by underground musicians working the blues circuit; because in the absence of music business attention, one has to figure things out for oneself, right? Rock bands like the Stones and Led Zeppelin didn’t just steal their tunes from the blues, but they found a way to makes the blues’ small band format work in a big showbiz way. This model has worked successfully for so many bands since; religious zealots said that KISS stood for “Knights In Satan’s Service,” but I always imagined that a group of four relatively bright middle-class Jewish boys would be familiar with the business axiom “Keep It Simple, Stupid!”
AC/DC’s genius, upon formation, was to use their minimalist aesthetic to popularize adolescent regression. They were far from the first, nor were they even the most self-conscious: I think it can be argued that early Dictators, mid-period MC5, the Ramones and Iggy & the Stooges all nailed down a distinctly American response to the pomp and pretension of ’60s hippie aspirations. That all four of those bands rock so hard is almost a by-product of their shared attitude, one of creating a musical diagram of the typical American adolescent (male) mindset: hormones, testosterone, rejection, awkwardness, and thinking you know everything when you don’t are powerful tools when put in the hands of a handful of kids holding microphones, drumsticks, and guitars plugged into amplifiers.
But for the most part, those four bands eventually gave away their ulterior objectives: The Dictators were rock critics first, and their music was almost a critique on the very thing they seemed to be championing; the MC5 had political aims that soon made them grow too big for their britches; the Ramones were the closest to this sort of adolescent purity (their ensuing stamina and relative consistency in the subsequent decades sprung forth from said purity), but their strict adherence to a code of downtown NYC underground rules would ensure that they remain arguably a cult act; and the Stooges just burnt out too quickly on the megalomania of their frontperson, who could never accept his position as just the singer in a phenomenal rock band — Iggy’s antics in the Stooges made him one of the most legendary and influential figures in rock history, but his mercurial nature signified that the flame that burns twice as fast lasts half as long.
When little Angus Young kept his schoolboy outfit on for a show and realized that this schtick might be a keeper, not only was a rock legend born, but the band’s aesthetic, and that aesthetic’s place in pop culture history, was forever solidified.
Part III: Rock’s Death Cult and Bon Scott: “I get older and they stay the same”
Any rock band that shows the discipline to stick to the script in order to consistently give fans what they want eventually winds up seeming somewhat, dare I say it, conservative. This is because rock musicians are supposed to be degenerate flakes who give in to ephemeral artistic whims, flights of fancy, and delusions of grandeur — or at the very least, be completely and utterly ridiculous like, say, Freddie Mercury, or W. Axl Rose — with outsized ambitions that far exceed what they can accomplish. These unrealistic aspirations, these desires to make the real world into something it isn’t, seem inevitably to lead down two predictable paths. One is the path of the drug casualty; the other is that of the Dead Rockstar. Both of these are compelling narratives that cycle up again and again in rock culture, and really, examples aren’t necessary, right?
One would of course be right to say that AC/DC are right in line with this rock-and-roll convention, considering that their original lead singer (well, technically their second singer, after Dave Evans), one Ronald Belfour “Bon” Scott, died at 33—the official report states the cause as “death by misadventure.”
(As a side note, I’m often surprised that AC/DC haven’t written a song or named an albumDeath by Misadventure — I mean, it’s not as though they’ve been particularly sensitive on the topic of Scott’s demise, what with including the song “Have a Drink on Me” on an album released a mere five months after their singer expired of “acute alcohol poisoning.”)
However, in the annals of rock’s famous hard partiers, drug casualties, and famous young dead people, Bon Scott’s passing never seemed to hit with the generation-defining gravitas of, say, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain or Janis Joplin. This isn’t because nobody cares about Bon Scott, nor is it because he wasn’t important enough to warrant serious moping and defiling of gravestones; but rather, the band so successfully re-branded themselves with a new singer that there was never really time for pop culture to mourn his passing.
It’s a great story, because Back in Black is a great album. Bands with singer changeovers tend to have fans who put themselves in one camp or another. (Although, really, are there Van Hagar fans? Is there a single VH fan who had heard it all and prefers the Red Rocker?) Most discerning AC/DC fans, though they will often concede that Black is AC/DC at their best, usually prefer the Bon Scott years. Why?
Well, for one, Scott died at the top, so we’ve never had to see him as a bald old man; he lived it like he sang it (or so it would seem), and thus, there’s a more direct corollary between the Bon Scott in the lyrics and the Bon Scott you see in footage clips. And let’s be blunt here: Bon Scott comes across as a pretty pervy dude in pretty much every live clip you will ever see. Often shirtless with jeans a few sizes too small, so as to emphasize his “meat and two veg,” as the Brits would say, he was a lech of the first order.
Bon Scott was a devious Loki — his songs may detail desperation and down times, but with the sly smirk of someone who is only using these tales as gimmicks to get in a girl’s pants. He was almost a decade older than the rest of the band and it showed. Angus wore a schoolboy’s outfit because he wasn’t far removed from the age of actually being one; but Bon Scott was more like Matthew McConaughey’s character Wooderson inDazed and Confused: hanging around with these young Young brothers allowed him access to a youth culture that he was arguably too old for at this point. Even on his studio recordings you can practically hear his shit-eating grin.
Scott was a true rock subversive, however. “It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Want To Rock N Roll)” may sound like a triumphant celebration of the spirit of rock, but lyrically, it is littered with overwhelming obstacles to living your dream. Honestly, it’s the kind of behind-the-curtain looksy that you don’t normally get: “Getting had/Getting took/I tell you, folks, it’s harder than it looks” is more in line with the tenor of down-on-his-luck-era Sinatra than any rock and roll utopian dream. And it’s concrete too: it’s about fighting the world and losing, and then getting up and doing it again — only with bagpipes.
Scott would return to this theme on Highway to Hell, and before he died he got to be confronted with blatant misunderstanding as conservatives the world over took the title tune’s theme of the toll of the road as a paean to Satan. Apparently, a lot of Scott’s sarcasm went right over people’s heads. When he sang, “Living easy, living free/Season ticket on a one-way ride,” it wasn’t in celebration, it’s a tired lament from a weary soul who is starting to give up on his fight.
Bon Scott was easy to misunderstand. His lyrics and presentation were leery and threatening, and everything was displayed behind a veneer of sarcasm. If his odes to rock and roll were really cynical sighs of futility, some of his other songs were more straightforward in their predatory intent. The most infamous song in the Bon Scott catalog is probably Highway to Hell closer “Night Prowler,” which became notorious five years after his death when serial killer Richard Ramirez (who earned the nickname “The Night Stalker”) claimed AC/DC as an influence. In an era where rock and roll was under attack for its lyrics, this particular case is more convincing than, say, Judas Priest’s or Ozzy Osbourne’s trials. There was no trial for AC/DC, but mounting pressure from campaigning parents groups dumped bad publicity on the band and heralded in their temporary decline in the late ‘80s. The band has since defended the song as being “about a boy sneaking into his girlfriend’s room at night,” but in doing so they are attempting to neuter a particularly threatening tune. “No one’s gonna warn you/No one’s gonna yell ‘Attack!’/And you don’t feel the steel/Til it’s hanging out your back” is a chilling little quatrain. Injecting murder, intimations of violence, and terror into rock is of course just one more way that Scott kept his audience on their toes; like Mick Jagger with “Gimme Shelter” and “Midnight Rambler,” the horror of the tune is meant to let the audience/listener know: “Hey, wake up, this is serious!”
Of course, it probably all got too serious for the Young brothers when Scott died just as the band were finally beginning to supernova with the success of Highway to Hell; I always felt that the most chilling part of any AC/DC song is in Scott’s “Live Wire” when he sings, “I ain’t foolin’, cantchoo tell?” We most certainly could: his death made so many of his lyrics make sense, as it was clear that he really was living the “one-way ticket” life he so often alluded to. Particularly of note are these lines from “Ride On” off of Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap:
Got another empty bottle
And another empty bed
Ain’t too young to admit it
And I’m not too old to lie
I’m just another empty head.
Part IV: Brian Johnson, AC/DC Re-branded, And the Dick-Joke-As-Populist-Move
It would be an act of revisionist history to attempt a portrayal of Bon Scott as merely a serious and sinister artist; for the most part, his legacy in the annals of rock is his idiosyncratic brand of lyrical perversion. Again, the elder Scott had a preoccupation with the defiling of youth, and he often put a witty aristocratic air into his smutty couplets: “Love at First Feel” manages to almost make poetry out of smirking lines like, “I didn’t know if you were legal tender/But I spent you just the same.” And of course there is “Big Balls,” a song that serves as a crushing commentary on smug aristocracy what with it’s crotch-to-the-face punning crudeness: “Some balls are held for charity/and some for fancy dress/but when they’re held for pleasure/they’re the balls that I like best.” (Now wait, whose balls does he like?)
Which brings us to AC/DC’s phallic obsession — one would almost think that AC/DC are at times living up to the bisexuality of their name. High Voltage (1975) contained a curious tune called “She’s Got Balls” — although Bon Scott repeatedly explained that the song was written as an ode to the toughness of his (soon-to-be-ex) wife at the time, one has to wonder what the band’s predominantly adolescent fanbase must have made out of such a confusing and confounding ditty. The verses concern his paramour’s lustful appetite and submissive nature, but the chorus’s repetition of the title doesn’t match up: if “She’s Got Balls” is a metaphor for how tough his woman is, then why is the narrator telling us that she “Likes to crawl/all around the floor on her hands and knees/because she likes to please?”
We all know the answer to this, of course: to think too much about the retarded nature of AC/DC’s sexual puns is to fall for their trap. Like taking offense at Beavis and Butthead playing frog baseball, AC/DC’s lyrical dick jokes are the “that’s what she said” of rock. And though Bon Scott was able to carry them across with an air of menace that made you almost forget that the lyrics didn’t make any sense, from Back in Black onward, it was almost like Bon’s smutty entendres were being passed around endlessly in his absence, like an office where all the guys keep doing the Budweiser “Whazzaahp?” long after the guy who originally started doing it had left the company.
In the wake of Scott’s death, the remaining members of AC/DC somehow managed very quickly to pull things together and start auditioning new singers to complete their next record. Brian Johnson got the gig based on a convincing run-through of Scott-era classic “Whole Lotta Rosie,” a song Scott wrote about having sex with a large woman. In retrospect, the choice of Brian Johnson might seem odd: he sounds literally nothing like Scott. Although both singers have voices that might be loosely categorized as “rough,” Johnson’s is severely lacking in the slyness and deviousness that made Bon Scott such a singular talent. Instead, Johnson’s voice is constantly at the point of an adenoidal breakdown, like the sound of a man who sings with his nuts in a vice.
But, Johnson makes sense. First of all, he’s not an operatic singer, which sets AC/DC apart from almost all of their competition at the time; and most important, Johnson’s style, instead of riding a sarcastic wave over the listeners head, lobs an intense glottal detonation at it. Brian Johnson was balding, old, and weathered looking, yet still full of regular-guy power and piss. In short, choosing Johnson was a wise populist move on the band’s part, and it’s a move that has been paying off ever since.
Part V: Back in Black and Conservative Rock: How It’s Done, Son
How successful has that move been? Let’s look at some numbers: The album they first made together, 1980’s Back in Black, has sold an estimated 42 million copies, making it the second most successful album of all time. They have sold more than 200 million albums worldwide, making them the sixth best-selling musical artist of all time. There is only one other rock band that has outsold them, and that is the Beatles. Their discography has outsold Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and ABBA. They are the most successful hard rock band of all time.
And they did this by taking Back in Black as an exercise in redefining rock and roll. In an era of new wave, punk, emerging hip-hop, disco, and all sorts of splintering musical fads and trends, BIB was insistent and powerful, but more important, it was inclusive. Whereas so much of hard rock and metal was about defining oneself as outside of the norm, AC/DC were re-writing the rules, or rather, dumbing them down. As Johnson sings on “Rock And Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” “Rock and roll ain’t no riddle, man/To me it makes good, good sense.”
You have to place this move in its historical context a bit to appreciate how successful it is: KISS had their own army; Judas Priest would soon be emphasizing the exclusive nature of their union of metalheads. All around the world, lines were being drawn between genres, as increased sophistication and specification in music was creating more and more separate musical experiences for people growing up and experiencing culture. AC/DC’s way through this was to appeal to the base: If rock and roll is a low culture, then play low culture music that isn’t ashamed to be what it is — and stick to it, because once people get it, they are going to want it again and again. It worked: AC/DC as a brand became synonymous with back-to-basics hard rock, and what the industry found was that no matter how a music fan might self-identify, the odds are that somewhere in there was a fan of back-to-basics hard rock. When you sell 42 million copies of an album, it isn’t all to the faithful — but that’s the price you pay when you reach out to everyone.
This is, of course, completely at odds with so many people’s conception of what rock is all about; especially the Woodstock generation’s sense that rock and roll is merely a means to cultural radicalism and fringe expression. Compared to the freak-out acid haze of even the most resilient ’60s leftovers, the music of AC/DC comes down like a gigantic boot on top of experimentation and genre studies: AC/DC took previous rock forms, diluted their essence, and then took over the world with repeated lessons in How It’s Done.
Part VI: “Thunderstruck,” Black Ice, Wal-Mart, and the “Event Album”
Of course, what kids really want to do is play along (witness the Guitar Hero/Rock Bandphenomenon of the last few years), as rock and roll retreats into a safe and relatively nostalgic entity, where you participate interactively via your living room instead of in a scary stadium full of fans.
. . . . Unless that scary stadium of fans is a Palin rally last month where she emerged to an apoplectic crowd to the tune of the opening tweedle-dee tap-flashing of “Thunderstruck,” off of 1989’s The Razor’s Edge. Why “Thunderstruck”? (Besides the fact that it fucking rules?) Well, as the lady puts it herself: “I don’t think we’ve ever had intro music by AC/DC before. That was kinda cool. In fact, we were on the bus today, we were making a list of who are some celebrity singers who could come out and help us and gosh, for the life of us, the pickings were slim there. Who’s quasi-conservative out there in the celebrity-land?”
There aren’t really any stunners on their new Black Ice like “Thunderstruck,” although new single “Rock N Roll Train” has a terrific gang-vocal chorus that feels as anthemic as anything (if not more so) than anything they’ve done in the past 20 years or so. The rest of the album is terrific (if somewhat monotonous), mostly because they reiterate their theme of loving rock and roll. But they are clearly past the point of making new statements. For a band as iconic as AC/DC to change the game at this point would be almost reckless.
The exclusive deal between Wal-Mart and the band to distribute Black Ice might have surprised some, but it was ultimately an astute move. This band wants to continue to get live human beings to purchase tangible recorded albums in brick-and-mortar stores, a desire whose fulfillment has become increasingly elusive for so many artists and labels in the last few years as the wagons circle on the major-label music industry. Consider this, then, perhaps one of the major label eras final Event Albums, records where everyone had to show up at the store to buy it and then collectively respond with either enthusiasm or a sea of “meh”s. Event Albums are so rarely the albums that rock history is kind to. We’re talking about Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I & II, etc. —hyped albums by bands that have been around long enough that the industry looks to them to save them.
The move was, predictably, a mammoth success: Black Ice sold almost 800,000 copies in the US in its first week alone, and is already the second best-selling record of 2008 (behind only Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III). We all know how this is going to play out: successful tour, lots of happy fans, uptick in AC/DC shirt sightings worldwide for the next few years, and maybe they’ll tour again or maybe not. At this point, AC/DC’s mission as the alpha and omega of modern rock music is relatively complete, and it’s just victory lap after victory lap for them until they can no longer run the track anymore. In which case, it will become someone else’s duty to be the official back-to-basics archetype for the next 35 years. Any volunteers?
AC/DC + THE ANSWER | TD Banknorth Garden, 100 Legends Way, Boston | November 9 at 7:30 pm | $90 | www.livenation.com
LET THERE BE ROCK: Angus's message is, "Behold the majesty of this chord!"
Angus Young is a sight to behold. In the midst of last Sunday night’s sold-out-all-the-way-to-the-nosebleeds gig at the “Gahden,” his band AC/DC were in the midst of bringing chestnut “The Jack” down to a slow burn. The 5’2″ Young put his guitar down, sauntered to center stage, and slowly and seductively began removing his schoolboy outfit piece by piece; at 53, Young probably has a lock right now on the title of most successful stripper in America. He spared us the full moon, but he and his band delivered an absolute powerhouse set.
The key to understanding AC/DC’s musical alchemy is in Young’s iconic stance: one hand is on the fretboard, holding a power chord, the other hand is up in the air, pointing a finger. This isn’t fist-in-the-air rock — the message is, “Behold the majesty of this chord!” It’s the secret to how AC/DC continues to fill stadiums well into their fourth decade. Their music flourishes in its open space, and the band take their sweet time working an audience into a frenzy. It was particularly refreshing to see an arena rock show with no synths or sequencers, no backing vocals or tracks, nothing but five guys, two guitars, bass, drums, and the occasional 100-foot inflatable woman.
Singer Brian Johnson hit “Whole Lotta Rosie” out of the park, while his sloppy-joe everyman antics grounded the Olympic Ur-riffing of his colleagues. The setlist balanced past with present — although the riffs always seemed nastier when the band dipped into the Bon Scott-era material, especially during “Hell Ain’t a Bad Place To Be.” The pinnacle was reached near the end in “Let There Be Rock”: Angus ran down the catwalk, his fretboard almost smoking. Reaching the end, he and his tantrum-on-the-floor duckwalk were literally put on a pedestal as he was hydraulically hoisted into the air. As they closed the show with a six-cannon salute in “For Those About To Rock (We Salute You),” the 15,000 faithful on hand had no choice but to salute (and submit).
HEAD SCRATCHERS: Expect another work of genre-hopping, inscrutable genius from Of Montreal.
In a few decades, we’ll probably look back on the tumultuous days of autumn 2008 the way we now look back on the fall of ’68: as a tense political atmosphere subsumes all, the stirring pop hits of the day can’t help but reflect the refracting cracked mirror of our nation’s increasingly emotion-laden psyche. Or at least, that’s the conventional fable about why major labels and rock stars exist: to take our hopes and fears and produce the archetypes that will inspire us during the interesting times we hope to live in. But those broken mirror shards now resemble nothing more than the zillion smashed-out pieces of our pop culture, as everything from Disney tween pop to vinyl-only garage scuzz to low-down stripper krunk exists on its own little fringe island.
NELLY’s long-delayed Brass Knuckles (Derrty/Universal) sees the light of day on September 16, with the unlikely guest-list mishmash of Fergie, Chuck D, Akon, Snoop Dogg, Usher, and T.I. Being under house arrest on pending gun charges hasn’t slowed T.I. down — his new Paper Trail (Grand Hustle/Atlantic) hits on September 30. Swizz Beatz and Kanye are all over it, and watch for M.I.A.-sampling lead single “Swagger like Us” with Jay-Z and Lil Wayne. R. KELLY is another artist who hasn’t let his recent run-ins with the law slow him down: this fall will see the release of 12 Play 4th Quarter (Jive). Kelly dials down the outlandish tone of his last few albums, but if lead single “Hair Braider” is any indication, this isn’t going to be a chaste and penitent move for the R-Man. LUDACRIS’s new Theater of the Mind (Def Jam; October 21) is billed as “conceptual,” though we can assume that he’s staying away from the kind of political diss that got him in hot water with the Obama campaign.
Pop diva CIARA’s Fantasy Ride (Jive; December) is rumored to be a multi-disc extravaganza in three parts titled “Groove City,” Crunktown,” and “Kingdom of Dance.” This fall will also see two former Destiny’s Child solo discs: BEYONCÉ’s Virtuoso Intellect (Columbia; November 11) and MICHELLE WILLIAMS’s Unexpected (Columbia; October 7). And October 7 marks the release of two competing hipster-diva records: Norwegian electro-dance queen ANNIE’s Don’t Stop (Island) follows up on her 2004 Pitchfork-friendly debut, and LADY GAGA’s much delayed debut, The Fame (Interscope), shows her taking Kylie Minogue’s Eurosleaze throb and giving it an American twist. Lady GaGa is also part of the songwriting/producing army behind the PUSSYCAT DOLLS album Doll Domination (A&M/Interscope/Polydor; September 23), where the production credits will include Timbaland and Cee-Lo. Likewise on the manufactured-pop front, there’s the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3 soundtrack (Walt Disney; October 24), which will probably sell enough copies to allow the rest of the music industry to wheeze along for another quarter. November 11 will see the release of the as-yet-untitled fourth album by former American IdolKELLY CLARKSON, whose powerful voice and unpretentious vibe have, no surprise, doomed her to a drama-laden trip through the biz; we’ll all have to wait with bated breath to see whether Clive Davis has shackled her with an overbearing production and songwriting team as penance for the underwhelming sales of 2007’s self-written and gloomy My December. Speaking of gloomy: October 13 marks the release of the CURE’s self-produced 13th long-player, 4:13 Dream (I Am/Geffen), which is rumored to comprise the more upbeat songs they recorded during a recent productive stint. (The darker tunes may be released on a future album.) Also look for a more stripped-down feel on the forthcoming third album from the KILLERS, whose Day and Age (Island; November) jettisons the overblown studio pomp of 2006’s Sam’s Town in favor of a Roy Orbison–influenced shimmering pop sheen under producer Stuart Price (Madonna’s Confession on a Dance Floor). OASIS return this fall as well, with Dig Out Your Soul (Big Brother/Sony; October 7), which, much like 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth, is an expertly crafted rock album with crushing sonics, big hooks, stellar playing, and a winning glance back at rock’s history that’s being hyped as a return to form by a band who never fell off the horse in the first place. AC/DC’s new Black Ice (Columbia; October 21, only at Wal-Mart — go figure) will shock fans by veering into trip-hop and sensitive balladry. Just kidding. Lead single “Rock N’ Roll Train” is pretty much what you’d expect: Highway to Hell riffage, Powerage production, and the glottal howl of Brian Johnson. Metal Blade spits up a few Viking-themed metal releases on September 30, with AMON AMARTH’s Twilight of the Thunder God and BISON B.C.’s Quiet Earth. And all hail the return of Brooklyn-via-Columbus stoner thrashers EARLY MAN, whose Jack Endino–produced Beware the Circling Fin EP (The End Records; October 14) finds them surviving their dumping at the hands of old label Matador and living to thrash another day. Brooklyn’s VIVIAN GIRLS convert their garage-rocking out-of-print vinyl-only homonymous album to 1’s and 0’s on October 7 with the help of In the Red Records. Swedish ’70s psychedelic guitar-hero revivalists DUNGEN unveil their fourth long-player, 4 (Subliminal Sounds) on September 23, alongside TV ON THE RADIO’s dark, angry and yet glammy and funky Dear Science, (Geffen). Also on October 7: two head-scratching works of inscrutable genius, OF MONTREAL’s dense, genre-hopping Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl) and San Francisco punk-art weirdos DEERHOOF’s new two-act opus, Offend Maggie (Kill Rock Stars).
