by Anthony Bozza
As a life-long AC/DC fan, former Rolling Stone journalist Anthony Bozza ponders why it took until the mega-selling Black Ice album for the band to begin to get some of the real critical success he thinks they've long deserved. His argument is a strong one, and in this book he dissects AC/DC's music into its constituent parts as if examining the workings of a car or the valves of the human heart. By doing this, and doing it with humour and an engaging spark to his writing, Bozza is somehow able to stretch what would ordinarily be a feature article into a 160-page book that even the doubters his argument is aimed at would enjoy.
Why AC/DC Matters is a good read, carefully examining the way a band has been able to use little more than five open chords to write close to 200 songs and sell more albums than everyone except The Beatles. Bozza's analysis is meticulous as he considers Malcolm Young's style of play and speaks with college professors about the vocal abilities of Brian Johnson and Bon Scott. It's a strange intellectualisation of a band that -- rightly or wrongly -- is widely considered by critics as an antithesis of intellectualism. Yet herein lies Bozza's point: for a band to have made such simple music so successful for so long actually requires real genius.
While he does make this point, and few readers could come away from it disagreeing with him, it's hard to see exactly who this book is aimed at. As a biography it's irrelevant in the wake of Murray Engleheart's colossal Maximum Rock n Roll and it really doesn't offer anything new to either fans or non-fans. AC/DC, he writes, have made the same music for almost 40 years. This is a fact everyone knows. Their music is simple, but lots of people like it. Everyone knows this too. And as a lot of people also know, outside the metal and guitar mags, music critics have never much liked them. Nothing Bozza writes about AC/DC is anything I didn't already know; it's almost as if he wrote this just to please himself and his agent sold it on knowing that people would buy it because it's about the second-highest selling band in history. Even so, unlike I did with Stephen Davis' Guns N' Roses debacle, I didn't feel gyped by Why AC/DC Matters. It might be ultimately rather pointless, but it is good fun.
Why AC/DC Matters is a good read, carefully examining the way a band has been able to use little more than five open chords to write close to 200 songs and sell more albums than everyone except The Beatles. Bozza's analysis is meticulous as he considers Malcolm Young's style of play and speaks with college professors about the vocal abilities of Brian Johnson and Bon Scott. It's a strange intellectualisation of a band that -- rightly or wrongly -- is widely considered by critics as an antithesis of intellectualism. Yet herein lies Bozza's point: for a band to have made such simple music so successful for so long actually requires real genius.
While he does make this point, and few readers could come away from it disagreeing with him, it's hard to see exactly who this book is aimed at. As a biography it's irrelevant in the wake of Murray Engleheart's colossal Maximum Rock n Roll and it really doesn't offer anything new to either fans or non-fans. AC/DC, he writes, have made the same music for almost 40 years. This is a fact everyone knows. Their music is simple, but lots of people like it. Everyone knows this too. And as a lot of people also know, outside the metal and guitar mags, music critics have never much liked them. Nothing Bozza writes about AC/DC is anything I didn't already know; it's almost as if he wrote this just to please himself and his agent sold it on knowing that people would buy it because it's about the second-highest selling band in history. Even so, unlike I did with Stephen Davis' Guns N' Roses debacle, I didn't feel gyped by Why AC/DC Matters. It might be ultimately rather pointless, but it is good fun.
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