School of Rock is definitely one of the best movies of the 2000s, but looking at how Black’s career has panned out, there’s a good chance that he didn’t need to prepare for the film since he’d been playing that part nearly all his life. He was the true embodiment of what a rock and roll fan should be, but he could admit that he had his favourites that were miles above what any other rock and roll band were capable of.
Then again, was anyone going to argue with one of the members of the self-proclaimed greatest rock band in the world? Black may have had a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour whenever he went out on the road with Tenacious D, but given how many times they have written some genuinely great rock songs with funny lyrics, it’s not like he wasn’t willing to put in the work whenever working on those tunes. He was willing to bring in the big guns, but the idols always stayed the same.
The Beatles may be one of the greatest bands in Black’s record collection, but you can tell that he was going for something a bit heavier when he started making songs like ‘Tribute’. The tune obviously is taking cues from everything from Metallica’s ‘One’ to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and when you listen to Black’s performance, there’s no doubt that he believes he’s making one of the greatest rock and roll songs that anyone ever spat out. But not all rock masterpieces are meant to be episodic adventures.
That was certainly a part of it, and given Black’s love for bands like Rush, it’s not like he didn’t have an affinity for more cerebral tunes, but he did have a lot of love for when rock and roll bands got back to the meat and potatoes of everything. You have to be able to ‘Rock and Roll’ as well as ‘Kashmir’ when listening to Zeppelin, but nothing gets better than AC/DC when it comes to pure rock and roll.
The Young brothers never once tried to stray from the formula, and even if their records may have sounded a little bit same-y to people, they were never going to apologise for it, either. They were making the kind of music that made people want to pump their fists in the air and sing along in massive stadiums, and when it came to the guitar riff, Black felt that no one had really done it better than what Angus could do.
Aside from having a uniform that is equal parts awesome and ridiculous whenever he comes onstage, Angus was the gold standard for what a guitar player should be in Black’s eyes when he heard ‘Thunderstruck’, saying, “That came way later. You could have said, ‘Okay, you guys, farewell tour?’ No, not so fast. Angus Young is a genius. He’s come up with more riffs than anybody, pound for pound.”
But the reason those riffs still work is because they go back to the kind of music that was popular before rock and roll was even a set genre. Most people were still learning the basics of the blues when they started to play guitar, but even if what Angus was playing was “simple” by some people’s definition, it’s hard to think of anyone that was able to put that much swagger into any of their songs, whether it’s the swagger of Bon Scott or the pure power that Brian Johnson continues to bring to the table.
No matter who’s singing for them, though, the power behind AC/DC is finding that perfect balance between rock and roll perfection and simplistic songwriting every time they walk into the studio. So while Black could claim to be a student of rock and roll and play in one of the greatest bands that the world has ever seen, was there anyone trying to compete with the schoolboy who transcended what a rock and roll guitarist could be?