A column dedicated to great songs, old and new.
May 16, 2006
Written by Angus Young, Malcom Young, and Brian Johnson
From Back in Black, Atlantic Records, 1980
Oh, man. 1980. This was the year I entered the 7th grade at my crazy, racially-divided public junior high school in South San Jose. Racial "rumbles" (not quite riots) loomed a couple of times during my stay there, though the general vibe was truthfully more of alienation and unfamiliarity than menacing tension and hatred. Nevertheless, the threat of race-oriented rumble got a lot of people excited, and revealed some unusual sides of people I thought I knew. I remember one dude showing me his mace--not the spray kind but the medieval kind--on a bus ride home, declaring he would use it on his next-door neighbor and friend if it came down to that.
Back in Black
AC/DC
It's strange to recall that at the time, a lot of these divisions revolved around music. At this particular school, if you were any kind of minority, you liked R&B and soul, and if you were white, you liked rock, and that was that. In some ways it was more about music than race. Anybody of one music preference who got too close to someone from the "other" camp was often questioned and taunted by his or her usual crew. To put it in purely musical and accesory terms, you either blasted Cameo's "Shake Your Pants" from your box on the quad lawn, or you wore "stoner boots" and listened to Triumph in your big brother's Camaro in the parking lot. Being a mixed-race person who identified as a minority, preferred R&B/soul music, but had friends of all backgrounds, this divison made me uncomfortable. My friend Eddie Guerrero, who I met through the school band, shared the same discomfort, but found a unique way to placate both sides. Eddie was heavy into soul AND rock. He had decorated the 2 sides of his Pee Chee folder to please his two sets of friends: one side had a KSOL (the local R&B station) sticker, with names like Rick James, Gap Band, Prince, Cameo, and Grandmaster Flash scrawled on it. The other side had a KSJO (still a major SJ rock station) sticker, with names like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Nazareth, and Marshall Tucker Band written on it (back then, Pee Chee folders were huge signifiers for your musical preferences--everyone would sneak a peek to see where you stood, musically). Eddie told me that he ran with two crews, and that he would flip his Pee Chee to the "rock" side when he saw his rock homeboys, and then flip it to the "soul" side his soul/R&B homeboys. What a tangled web Eddie Guerrero wove.
Naturally, I was quite curious about this other music Eddie was getting into. Wasn't AC/DC satanic? Wasn't it just a bunch of screaming? I found out soon enough, through a neighbor friend, also named Eddie. Eddie Fisher was a half-Chicano, half-white dude who was one of the first people on our block to gain access to tapes by the notoriously filthy rapper Blowfly. He was also secretly into AC/DC, and he agreed to tape "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "Back in Black" for me on a Certron tape. I was hooked from the first note.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to come up with lofty descriptions of this song. I mean, what can one really say about "You Shook Me All Night Long"? It just fuckin' ROCKS. It's also funky, in that big-beat, amped-up-blues, hard-rock way ("Back in Black" is even funkier). The guitar intro is still one of the coolest in all of rock, the screechy vocal by Brian Johnson and nasty,leering lyric (focusing on American girls) is classic stuff, and "Mutt" Lange's production is big and booming. I think it might even be fair to say that if you don't like this song, you probably don't like rock n roll....and it's your loss.
Though I'm not a huge fan of much of the pre-fab pop and hip-hop which now dominates Top 40 (I actually feel that pop is currently in a state of sickly, circular regurgitation and imitation), I do appreciate how this young generation, though not immune to racial prejudices, seem to have far fewer hang-ups when it comes to music, cliques, and race. That is, I think it's unlikely that any of these Gen Y'ers are getting their asses kicked for enjoying, say, both Green Day and Kanye West. And to bring things full circle, I occasionally even observe some of today's teenagers and young adults wearing AC/DC hats and shirts, proving the timelessness of this kickass band.
1980 is dead. Long live 1980.
pcm
Purchase:
Back in Black
$8.99 at Amazon.com
$13.99 at Tower
Records
One of my coolest junior-high homies, Wen Davis, is now a popular DJ in the
south-bay; check him out here:
myspace.com/djwen