I recently listened to AC/DC on YouTube with my dad. The video below explains what happened. I’ve also posted the transcript.
Transcript:
My dad is 80 years old, and he’s discovered that he likes watching music videos on YouTube. One of the things he’s doing is trying to catch up on music that he missed during all those years when he was working hard.
I remember when I was a kid, he was always at work. His own organic discovery of music as a young person kind of stopped around the Beatles. I would say probably around 1965 or 1966.
So he missed the whole hard rock era. He knew a little bit about it. He knew who the Rolling Stones were and so on, but he was already doing other things by then.
Looking at the music from the 1980s, which is the era that I’m kind of an expert on, I said, “Dad, you’ve got to listen to AC/DC.”
He was open to the idea, and I figured that “Shoot to Thrill” was a good starter song for AC/DC.
He’s got a big Sony television, so I put up the “Shoot to Thrill” video on YouTube.
He watched it all the way through, but suffice it to say, he was not favorably impressed.
I said, “Dad, what’s wrong?”
His big complaint—and I knew he would zero in on this—was that Brian Johnson can’t sing. At least not in the conventional sense.
Now, again, I like AC/DC, so don’t give me any hate for criticizing them.
But if you look at music historically, there is a kind of dichotomy between music from the first half of the 1960s and earlier, and music from around the time I was born, in 1968, forward.
Some of those later singers could sing, but a lot of them couldn’t, at least not in the conventional sense.
If you listen to music from the first half of the 1960s, like the Beach Boys, those guys could definitely sing, whether or not you like their music.
I explained to my dad that what makes AC/DC’s music great, and what makes Led Zeppelin great, for that matter, isn’t necessarily the quality of the vocals.
It’s the experience of the music.
But music really wasn’t conceived that way back in the days of Elvis and the Beatles.
So there is a real generational dichotomy there, I would submit.