10 albums 10 days, day 5: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, AC/DC

This was one of those arguments with my mother.

1981, in Canada.

I first heard it in my buddy Carl’s attic, a week before it was released in North America. It was a Sunday night, we were playing chess and listening to 92 CITI FM. CITI had just been given this “new” album by AC/DC, the band that’d made a name for themselves singing cheerfully about Hell, so they were obviously devil worshippers. This was a station exclusive, and they played the album in its entirety.

Carl patiently dismantled my chess game until I was nothing but a king limping around behind three pawns. I’ve never been much of a chess player, but honestly, he had a considerable tactical advantage with the music being played. How was I supposed to develop a strategy while these songs were unfurling? As I argued with my mother once I finally mustered up the courage to buy my own copy, these songs are perfect, and you can’t argue with perfection.

Perfect, as in: you will find no truer marriage of direct, brute lyricism to a direct, brute musical modality.

And if you try to marry something else to those same three chords chopped out of a Gibson SG and fed through a Marshall stack — say, an evocation of Christ’s salvific grace extended freely to all sinners, perhaps — you’ll sound ridiculous.

No, these songs all attain their Platonic ideal — even, especially, “Squealer.” You can no more argue with a song like that than you can argue with “Folsom Prison Blues” or “Spiel Ich die Unschuld vom Lande.” It simply is what it is.

But, you know, if that’s the only music you can be bothered to listen to you need to stretch out just a bit.

And you can start by listening to The Muffs.

1993

Kim Shattuck isn’t the only rock ‘n’ roll singer/songwriter to explore female id-prompted horniness and (“Hold the letters folks!”) toxic femininity. Nor was that her sole preoccupation — not by a long shot — but when when she mined it, her commitment to its expression was utterly fearless and completely infectious, qualities she shares with Bon Scott.

Taken from us way too soon.

Day six...