One of several quality albums recorded under Bon Scott's reign as lead singer of this Australian hard rock juggernaut. I had several preconceived notions about what to expect going in. It'll be trashy. And it was, but it was also funny and impeccably performed. Like the dramatization of a Jerry Springer episode by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It'll be offensive. Well, kind of. Our cultural threshold for shocking lyrics has been moved so many times that it's difficult to know where - if anywhere - the line now exists. There's a streak of juvenile glee running through the songs here, an adolescent fascination with delinquency and hormonal release of all types. In that context, the monster guitar crunch of Malcolm & Angus Young doesn't sound so much like a back-to-basics aesthetic solution to the art rock pretensions of the 70's as it does self-medication by way of primal scream therapy. The formula is a simple one: loud = good, therefore louder = better. What I didn't expect was the downright conservatism of songs like "Rocker" and "There's Gonna Be Some Rockin'" which, if they had turned down their amps a bit, are essentially straightforward rockabilly blues. Or how perilously close they get to Spinal Tap-level self-parody on tracks like "Ain't No Fun (Waiting Round To Be a Millionaire)." As Chris Rock said about Biggie Smalls' "Mo' Money, Mo' Problems," this has to be one of the most popular songs almost no one can relate to. I could've done without "Big Balls" - the silly, double-entendre-dependent goof that is equal parts Mad Magazine, Dr. Demento, and Tenacious D - but I understand what it's doing here. It's not as if it's a black sheep track in an otherwise straight-laced family of songs. At any rate, all albums have their highs and lows, and I'll gladly forgive "Big Balls" after hearing the surprisingly sweet "Ride On." Scott portrays himself as a lonely, drunken, womanizing drifter, an "empty head." It's a sad self-inventory, an honest accounting of the emotional bankruptcy that lies beneath the gleaming, gilded surface of the rock and roll lifestyle, which is just one "red light nightmare" after another. He knows he should change his "evil ways," but he also knows enough to know that's unlikely. It is a rare island of super-ego in a vast sea of id. Grade: B
