PhilaLawyer.net - July 26, 2006

II. ARGUMENT

A. AC/DC is better than...

Band	Because
The Band	"The Last Waltz" - perfectly titled... a poor man's "Let There Be Rock."
Beastie Boys	Nobody cares about Tibet except Richard Gere.
Beatles	TIE. Beatles imploded over least coveted rock wife in history. However, they crush AC/DC in the "Serial Killer Inspired By" category, having set off the Manson Family massacre, whereas AC/DC inspired the low-rent "Night Stalker" killings.3
Black Sabbath	Bourgeois conspicuous Satanism.
The Clash	Do the British even pay attention to British domestic politics?
The Doors	"An American Prayer"
Bob Dylan	"Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial, Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while..." versus "You're always pushing, shoving, satisfied with nothing, You bitch, you must be getting old." Is it even worth debating?
Eagles	"Hotel California" - the only anti-drug anthem in rock history that actually achieves its purported goal. And Don Henley.
Fleetwood Mac	Teased hopeless fiends into believing blow was the path to brilliance ("Rumors"), only to brutally bludgeon the notion ("Tusk").4
The Grateful Dead	Phil occasionally sang. Bobby occasionally sang "Corinna." Microphone picking up Jerry passing wind during 20 minute "Stella Blue."
Jimi Hendrix	Schoolboy uniform beats feather boa.
Lenny Kravitz	Kravitz hasn't done his AC/DC record yet. When he does, it will sound exactly like AC/DC (and cost $3.99 four months after release).
Led Zeppelin	Tolkein quotations in several LZ songs; "Presence" album;5 keyboard solo in "All of My Love;" rest of "All of My Love."
Metallica	Bon Scott spared us a two hour documentary on therapy and redemption. "St. Anger" - proving the unfortunate irrefutability of Blake's observation on the interplay of excess and wisdom.
Phish	Work beats a Phish concert parking lot.
Pink Floyd	Ever see a stripper pole dance to "Shine on You Crazy Diamond"?
Radiohead	I'm supposed to like their new material so much I've developed performance anxiety about listening to it. I leave "Kid A" and "Amniesiac" on top of my coffee table so people will think I like them. When people ask me what I think about either, I say, "I dig that tune that starts as a low hum, then slowly builds into cacophonous wailing, then goes back to a hum."
Rage Against the Machine	I'm for killing cops and electing a Socialist president as much as the next guy, but there was always something that bugged me about De La Rocha's voice.6
R.E.M.	I haven't hurt, and I feel left out, alone, isolated and unhappy about it.
Rolling Stones	Tracks six through nine of every album since 1976.
Rush	Adolph Hitler is presently considering "Subdivisions" on acid.
Sigur Ros	See discussion of "Amnesiac" and "Kid A" above.
Smashing Pumpkins	Billy Corgan makes Phil Lesh sound like Tony Bennett.
U2	Malcolm Young's plan for third world debt relief is based on a much more sound projection of African economic growth over the next ten years than Bono's.
The Who	"Tommy" era Roger Daltrey and Sarah Jessica Parker... separated at birth?7
Yes	No.

B. Your distaste for AC/DC is more about you than the band

Most people who profess a strong dislike for AC/DC do so not because they actually can't stand the band, but because of what they think the band represents, and how they think enjoying the band would reflect on them.

AC/DC was originally produced by Harry Vanda and George Young, two Australians famous for putting out bubble gum pop with a group called the Easybeats during the 1960s. Later, the band was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange, a super producer famous for his work with Billy Ocean, The Cars, Def Leppard, The Boomtown Rats, The Corrs and Shania Twain.⁸ In the early 90s, they were briefly produced by the late Bruce Fairburn, famous for his work on various Hollywood soundtracks, Aerosmith and INXS albums. Given that list of big name pop producers, its no shock AC/DC has put out some of the catchiest hard rock songs of the past three decades. AC/DC is one of the very few infectiously danceable hard rock acts around, as any prom or visit to a strip club confirms.

Given its polished pop appeal, and the irresistible hooks in most of its songs, professing a strong dislike for AC/DC is akin to saying you hate "Louie, Louie" or "Satisfaction." Nevertheless, numerous types of people claim to hate the band.

i. Whitebread Prep School Kids

If you're white, upper upper middle class to wealthy and went to a prep school, your cd collection could generally be broken down to groups derivative of four bands - The Clash, The Velvet Underground, Bob Marley and the Grateful Dead. Reggae is cool because it's associated with dope and Black people your family sees on holiday in the Islands. The Clash are cool because they're angry and British, and no one understands what they're singing about (and they toyed with reggae). The Velvets are cool because they didn't sell any records, sang about hard drugs and hung out with Andy Warhol. Digging the Velvets in high school implied your parents owned Velvets records, which implied they once did serious drugs, which meant they probably had hip, sarcastic senses of humor, or the trust fund derived world weariness that goes with considering "Sister Ray's" 15 minute feedback solo on many a Sunday morning coming down. The Dead were a Left Coast version of the Velvets, and implied you had a cool young uncle who baked you senseless and duked you dimebags of the superkind at family gatherings. These people secretly crank "Highway to Hell" when it pops out of the car stereo, but they're as likely to admit enjoying it as they are to tell you the sailboat in the photo of the family from Christmas, 1997 - the one hanging prominently above their fireplace - is rented.

ii. Jam Band Junkies

Some of the people I know who most hate AC/DC are jam band junkies. The perception that these people are music nuts or dope freaks is wrong. They're actually zealots - misguided missionaries of a sort. Jerry Garcia famously stopped talking on stage in the 70s when he realized some heads were actually worshipping his words as a Jesus Freak would scripture. That was the Dead, the only band arguably worth worshipping.⁹ What's worshipped today in the vacuum of Jerry is a notion of a time and place that hasn't existed in 30 years - a saccharine stab at an ethos long forgotten and impossible to replicate. The innumerable jam bands passing as Dead Lite for the better part of the last two decades are missing the essential freakshow element that defined a Grateful Dead Concert. The crowd was part of the show, and the most entertaining of them, the spinning chicks and lost freaks, dazed, grasping for a semblance of sanity in the midst of a synaptic tornado, had truly given themselves over to Life on the Road. That's an honesty you couldn't find among a hundred heads bobbing along to Trey and Mike bouncing up and down on trampolines and playing vacuum cleaner solos.¹⁰ A fat chunk of the jam band junkie crowd aren't freaks, but seekers - awkward suburban businessmen's kids searching for something, anything, to connect to. Like the Jesus Freaks in the front pew at mass, they only know the certain truth they pay to hear, which is generally the five or ten bands they pass back and forth on their Trey Anastasio message boards. Anything outside That Thing of Theirs, particularly a pop-metal act, is bad.

iii. The Country Club Crowd

"The Joshua Tree" is an exceptional record. It might be one of the best albums in rock history. It's on every music critic's "Top Fifty of All Time" list, is at least 6 times platinum and spawned some of the biggest classic rock hits of the last 20 years. I love the record, but I might be biased. My affinity for it might stem from the fact that, like every other middle class kid in the late 80s, it was the soundtrack to almost every early sexual experience I had. But TJT was more than background white noise for bra unbuttoning and premature ejaculation. It was a bright line class/social scene barrier, at the time cleaving metalheads, stoners and blue collar kids from mainstream upwardly aspiring issue of parents who belonged to the local country clubs.

TJT was a badge. To like it implied you had an upscale ear, which, at a time when hair metal was the only new rock being released, was not an unsnobbish statement. When it came out, TJT immediately became the score to high school careers of tax lawyers' and stockbrokers' kids everywhere. It was what you listened to in the used truck dad gave you for your 16th birthday. It was the Muzak running through those hours sitting outside a beer distributor, waiting for "Kenny," the local alcoholic who bought you booze, to bring you a shopping cart loaded with cases of Bud pounders. It was what you listened to if you were interested in music, appreciated music, but were still mainstream, popular, fun-loving and top ten percent on your PSATs. You dug the Clash, but you wouldn't listen to the Clash because that was what the punk kids dug. You dug the Stones, but they had carried the stink of age - your parents owned their records. You dug the Allmans, but that was music for stoners. You quietly loved 70s classic rock, and sang along with the Foreigner staples played endlessly on local radio, but that was too provincial to admit. U2 was your perfect band. They were foreign, new wave, passionate and loud. But not too foreign, too new wave, overly passionate or loud in the frightening manner of 1987's other monster group, Guns and Roses. In many ways, TJT was the anti-"Appetite for Destruction," and the anti-"Exile on Main Street," anti-"Workingman's Dead" and anti-"London Calling."¹¹ TJT was music you wouldn't be ashamed to shuffle to in an oxford shirt and khaki shorts, with a sweater tied around your neck. Basically, it was the musical equivalent of Polo clothing in the late 80s. It even came with its own perfectly inoffensive and profound anthem - "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" - a Generation X "American Pie" wailed endlessly by countless sisterhoods of cheerleaders and drunken doctors' daughters at every keg party from 1987 through 2000. "I. Am. Going. To. Miss. You. So. Much. In. College."

Ashley Kentner Students for MADD, Cheerleading, Spirit Club Never forget Kerry's party (BSE). Beach Week, yes! Late night at Jeremy's, always. Katie, Kaitlin, Kerry (BFF). "I still haven't found what I'm looking for..."12

To a large swath of these people, AC/DC remains a musical fire engine red Camaro - a symbol of what they've worked tirelessly to ensure you know They're Not. I never understood this insecurity, as a shoebox of 80s mix tapes containing AC/DC, Black Flag and Led Zeppelin, interspersed with cuts from TJT and "The Unforgettable Fire," can attest. I wouldn't say those bands mixed seamlessly, but I can't find any basis for them to be mutually exclusive. Unless, of course, you want them to be.

iv. "Intellectuals"

I used to like Radiohead, but not anymore. It isn't so much something the band did as the band's fans and the self-important, overly-analytical people who write about their music. I'm now unable to hum along with "Karma Police" without considering the implications of technological advances on our ability to communicate with one another. Where I used to be able wail along with the eerie "Layla"-like closing chorus of "Paranoid Android," I'm now left troubled at the notion that the internet might be turning us into actual androids, programmed subconsciously by an insidious unrecognizable industrial complex running the world wide web. But I can't exclusively blame rock critics and pseudo-intellectuals. Thom Yorke bears some responsibility for the epidemic of angst amongst 20-somethings left in the wake of Radiohead's concept records. He didn't have to put "Fitter Happier" on "OK Computer."

If you've listened to "OK Computer," you know "Fitter Happier." It's the "message" song on the album - the one intended to ensure that even the most challenged listener understands the deep meaning behind the record. In case you've made it to track seven without realizing the album is about alienation and boredom, and that 21st Century man is better off sucking the business end of a loaded .44 than waking up 90% of his days, "Fitter Happier" gives you four minutes of a Steven Hawking-like voice lamenting man's stultifying existence over a cacophony of whirrs, beeps and buzzers. You're "a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics."¹³ I don't need the message song, but I do see its value. Who would realize "The White Album" emerged from Lennon's flirtation with Pyramidology and lifelong fascination with square roots but for "Revolution Number 9"? Is "Ummagumma's" early animal rights stance anything but opaque save the strident "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict?" The message song/dirge/anthem can be helpful. On your sixth bourbon, fiddling with a roach clip and fumbling to read the tiny, blurry, liner notes of an old Doors cd, its nice for someone to blurt out the point for you. Oh, yeh... this tune's about how you 'Cannot. Petition. The. Lord. With. Prayer!' I wish we didn't need these message songs, but then, I guess there'd be no way for people like Thom Yorke to make sure rock critics were analyzing the right concept.

For many of the same reasons I can no longer listen to Radiohead, I can't take Rage Against the Machine. RATM might have been the most talented funk metal band on the planet. Unfortunately, they were also political, in much the same way as your 15 year old cousin with the Fu Manchu goatee who just finished his third biography of Che Guevera. There's nothing wrong with political music. Some of Dylan's best work, both subtle ("Maggie's Farm") and incendiary ("Masters of War"), is political. But Bob always conveyed a simple political message. Like Neil Young's recent "Living with War," Dylan didn't offer a dilletante's diatribe on politics he didn't understand. His message was "I think this war is wrong, so let's stop it." Rage's alternatively sophomoric and infantile political stances, and Radiohead's obtuse scowling at society, don't purport to think anything, but instead tell the listener how informed the artists are, and how uninformed the listener is. They feed the pretensions of millions of people who think they know a whole lot more about everything than you or me. These people really hate AC/DC, for more reasons than I can list here. Let's just put it this way - the kind of person who'll tell you "Amnesiac" is brilliant and ruminate over the lyrics to "Kid A" isn't going to be downing Turkey and Cokes and boogieing to "Whole Lotta Rosie."

C. Women have some valid reasons for disliking AC/DC

Women get a pass for not liking AC/DC for the same reason men would never be expected to enjoy Sarah McLaughlin, Depeche Mode or the Counting Crows. Some bands don't bridge the sex barrier; AC/DC is one of them.

Although every girl I've dated since high school has politely listened to my AC/DC discs, it's impossible to imagine any of them enjoying the 8th grade sexuality of "Go Down," "Squealer," "Love at First Feel" or the quite ill-concieved double entendre, "Beating Around the Bush." Critics still debate whether "For Those About to Rock's" 2d through 5th tracks - "Put the Finger on You," "Lets Get It Up," "Inject the Venom" and "Snowballed" formed a lowbrow mini-opera, in the spirit of The Who's "A Quick One While He's Away," describing an instance of mutual masturbation and oral sex gone wrong. In perhaps its most sexually charged single, "The Jack," the band offers a brutal lament on the dangers of unprotected sex using a clever poker metaphor:

She gave me the Queen
She gave me the King
She was wheelin' and dealin'
Just doin' her thing
She was holdin' a pair
But I had to try
Her Deuce was wild
But my Ace was high
But how was I to know
That she'd been dealt with before
Said she'd never had a Full House
But I should have known
From the tattoo on her left leg
And the garter on her right
She'd have the card to bring me down
If she played it right

She's got the Jack¹⁴
She's got the Jack
She's got the Jack, Ooh, was a bad deal, Jack
She gave me the Jack hey
She's got the Jack, She's got the Jack, She's got the Jack
Ooh, can't ya tell?
She's got the Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack
She's got the Jack, She's got the Jack
She's got the Jack, She's got the Jack
You Never know! She's got the Jack
She's got the Jack, She's got the Jack
She's got the Jack, and it hurts!
She's got the Jack
She's got the Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack
She's got the Jack
AAAAAAAAAAAAH!

No woman has ever dropped the top, let her hair down and streamed off down the freeway singing along with a ten minute grinding blues dirge about a hooker with gonorrhea. If you've met a woman who has, she's probably exactly that. You're out $200 and the cost of a very painful ER visit.¹⁵ I hope you did well at the blackjack table...

This brings us to the second reason women don't like AC/DC. To many women, music is a sensual experience, something to dance and have sex to. You can dance all night to AC/DC, but you can never have sex to it. You can't even masturbate to AC/DC. You could be just about ready to reach for the Kleenex with your free hand, but if "T.N.T." should blast out of the cd changer, you're done - flaccid... self-coitis-interruptus. Nobody can come, alone or atop a supermodel, with an "Oi! Oi! Oi!" chant banging away in his head. How do you hold a straight face in mid-fuck, when the bagpipe intro from "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock N' Roll)" kicks in? No woman in her right mind wants to get jack-hammered to "Let There Be Rock" or hear the death knell opening of "Hells Bells" while she's staring into a headboard. Even the most pointless sex has a thin fiction of romance running through it. Screwing to AC/DC is akin to gang banging a boy scout troop - it's almost inevitable that sometime during the act, someone's going to yell "boobies!"

CONCLUSION

Everybody likes AC/DC. If you can't dig the groove in most of the band's classic catalogue, you've no soul. And if you can't admit digging it, shame on you. But if you've got a copy of "If You Want Blood, You've Got It" next to your receiver, teed up to be played at 11, no matter who's within earshot, what else can I say?

I salute you.

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³ The "Night Stalker," Richard Ramirez, was a low rent Zodiac Killer copycat who terrorized Los Angeles in the mid-80s, allegedly acting out the lyrics to a filler track, "Night Prowler" at the end of "Highway to Hell."

⁴ ...with a marching band.

⁵ Has anyone ever listened to that?

⁶ "Chihuahua under wheels of moped."

⁷ I realize this is not a valid criticism of the Who. If you want a real reason to be creeped out by the Who, read the lyrics to Townsend's "Rough Boys."

⁸ Lange's list of notable projects includes sleeping with Ms. Twain, his wife.

⁹ If you doubt this, listen to the recently released March 1969 Fillmore West Concerts.

¹⁰ But you could find it at an AC/DC show. If you doubt me, log onto Youtube and dig up footage of '68 Pigpen belting out "Turn on Your Lovelight," the part where the song builds to a climax where Pig jumps in, howling "She got box-back nitties, And great big noble thighs, Working undercover with a boar's hog-eye" at the audience between Jerry's squealing leads. Watch it side by side with footage of Bon Scott belting out "Rock and Roll Damnation" during AC/DC's 1978 tour. Both stalked the stage holding their mics like daggers and all but threatened the crowd with battery if it didn't get on its feet. And at their best, the two bands weren't even sonically all that different. Sure, AC/DC was louder and faster, and the Dead had more range, more chops and were obviously a million times more innovative. But when both bands were clicking, at the peak of their powers, they had a lot more in common than not. A screaming 1968/69 "Other One" or "The Eleven," drenched in distortion, when the band was still fast as lightning, wasn't that far removed from the amphetamine Chuck Berry boogie of a live "Let There be Rock/Rocker" from 1978. Both were the musical equivalent of sticking your finger in a wall socket.

¹¹ It's tempting to slam U2 for not having rock cred, but that'd be disingenuous. Although many of their songs are emasculated enough to hear covered at a Member/Guest dinner dance, U2 is a damn fine rock band, and deserves its position amongst the biggest of all time (except during their industrial phase in the early 90s).

¹² Ashley graduated from Denison in 1992, and currently lives in Shaker Heights with her husband, Carl Mofler, an associate Vice President with Merrill Lynch, and their two daughters, Kaitlin and Farren.

¹³ Whether Radiohead's need to spoon feed that point to its audience is more telling about its listeners or the band is up for debate.

¹⁴ "Jack" means "The Clap."

¹⁵ The "swab" test makes a root canal feel like a massage.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 2:11 AM