A TikTok video making the rounds on social media purports to show how easy it is to write an AC/DC song.
Created by the Sydney band Seaforth (@weareseaforth), which bills itself as a “pop/country duo that talk funny,” the clip shows how to use a keyboard to simulate drums and bass, three guitar chords — A, D and G — and a singer’s “best impression of Marge Simpson.”
The result? A few seconds of credible AC/DC-style rock, with the catchy lyrics, “What’s that? / Look out! / Dog on the road!”
Many people want Seaforth to finish the song. I do too. “Dog on the Road” might be the perfect coda for this interminable year.
Yet several comments on Twitter take Seaforth’s good-natured ribbing of AC/DC to the next level. They argue all AC/DC songs sound the same and the band has been recycling the same rhythm (especially drums) for most of its history.
Not to be a mansplainer here — or in this case a bandsplainer — and not that AC/DC’s originality or lack thereof is the hill on which I wish to die, but I would argue the consistency of sound is the reason many fans love AC/DC.
Yes, they sound pretty much like they did in the 1970s. No, they haven’t matured a bit lyrically. Their go-to subjects are still getting some nookie, the joys of playing rock, and occasionally getting some nookie after playing rock. Their latest album, “Power Up,” just reuses the template. If it ain’t broke and all that.
The band took the blues, stuck it into a light socket, and cackled over the resulting crackle. In the process, they created their signature sound. But hey, they did it first.
Alice Cooper, another rocker from AC/DC’s generation, noted in a recent Rolling Stone interview that “it’s easier to write something like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ than it is to write something like [the Beatles’] ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’” — those songs where “you could hear them one time and you knew them.”
Not that AC/DC is on the level of Lennon and McCartney, but the same principle applies. Both bands’ songs are deceptively simple. If it were just a matter of throwing a few notes together, why aren’t more wannabe rock stars doing it successfully?
Creating a song to mimic the supposed ease of another musician’s signature sound reminds me of the denouements in many Sherlock Holmes stories. Once Holmes had successfully solved some seemingly impossible crime, he explains it to Watson, who then comments on how the process is really quite simple, something anybody could do, much to Holmes’s chagrin.
And whether the limitation is a fixed number of notes or chords or a finite number of word and letter combinations — remember all those hypothetical monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare? — everybody works within the same restrictions. Some creators just do it better than others.
We are a society that too often equates simple with “easy” and complex with “hard.” Yet knowing what to take out is just as important as what to put in. The shortest sentence in a speech may have been rewritten dozens of times. A few seconds in a movie may have taken days to film and generated hours of unused footage.
AC/DC’s music, for all its three-chord cacophony, is harder than it looks to replicate. If Seaforth makes it look so effortless, it’s because they are talented musicians themselves.
In a piece that has already name-checked AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare, I’ll beg the readers’ forbearance as I quote Theodore Roosevelt, who said critics count far less than “the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming” from those who “actually strive to do the deeds …”
Even if they are dirty deeds, done dirt cheap.
Something to ponder while waiting on the inevitable single, “Dog in the Road.”
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
@cschillig on Twitter
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