It’s the time of the year when the nostalgia/easy listening radio stations are often the first to switch over to 24 hours of Christmas music. Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, Tony Bennett, and Johnny Mathis crooning about Santa, Silent Night, and snow.
Listening to AC/DC’s Black Ice, their 15th studio album, we’re nearing the time when they’ll be the new nostalgia. We won’t long for the days of Ol’ Blue Eyes but for Angus Young’s school-boy uniform. Nostalgia radio is programmed based on reminiscence, tradition, and familiarity. The music is safe—popular once, proven part of our pop culture, and inoffensive.
When AC/DC released Black Ice exclusively at Walmart, it signaled that they were entering the ranks of nostalgia. If AC/DC is now safe enough for the supposedly family-value driven Walmart empire, it won’t be too long before the Aussie band define nostalgia radio. What once was rebellious, ground breaking, and sexually charged, is now deemed safe, uplifting, and old. That’s Frank Sinatra; and now that’s AC/DC.
Black Ice has the familiar riffs which define AC/DC but also came to influence generations of rock ‘n’ roll bands and listeners. The album upholds the AC/DC tradition while getting us to reminisce for their glory days.
I always groaned when AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” came on at a high school dance (circa 1991). The song was tired, familiar, from the wrong generation, and with a locker room sexuality that made it seem cheap (“Knockin’ me out with those American thighs”). Perhaps I was already sensing that AC/DC would join the nostalgia ranks—with the songs my grandma hummed and the old songs that talked about making whoopee.
However, in the intervening years, somehow AC/DC went from tired to punchy, familiar (negatively) to celebrating the familiar, part of the old guard to the shoulders of giants on which we stand. Their dangerous sexuality is child’s play among the ranks today.
This is why Black Ice will be the first AC/DC album in my collection. (Something I never would have considered in high school as evidenced by the review I wrote of Razor’s Edge for the school newspaper). It’s good to have some nostalgic riffs in the stacks. I need a dose of muscle-shirt guitar and hard rock rhythms. It acts like a base to support all of the other rock ‘n’ roll on my shelves.
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[...] Squires — Leave a comment June 11, 2010 This picture comes from my December 2008 review of AC/DC and their release, Black Ice. I argued that it won’t be long before AC/DC becomes the staple of [...]