Angus Young, the AC/DC guitarist who still dresses in the round cap and short pants of an Australian schoolboy (despite turning 70 in March), once gave an amazing response to a frequent criticism about his band: People say AC/DC, founded in Sydney in 1973 (and playing a sold-out show at Soldier Field on Saturday), have been making the same album, and writing the same song, over and over, for the past 52 years. Since 1975, they’ve made 17 studio albums and every single one, to the non-metal head, casual listener and plenty of fans, sounds just like every other one.
So sometime in the ‘80s, when they still had only a dozen records, Young told a reporter he was “sick to death” of critics who say they have made 11 albums “that sound exactly the same — in fact, we’ve made 12 albums that sound exactly the same.”
That’s the healthiest thing a metal band ever said.
There’s freedom, and a profound understanding of craft, in repetition. I admire artists who do one thing again and again with little variety, sidling up to a proverbial lunch counter and proudly ordering the same sandwich every day without deliberation. I don’t mean the Warhols of the world espousing commodification, and or someone like Martin Scorsese who merely made a lot of gangster films.
I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean — artists who repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
There may be variation in there, but that would only be evident to a connoisseur. Also, I don’t include the cynical artist who recycles endlessly without intending to repeat. Mark Rothko, the great abstract painter who made countless “color fields” that could be described as soft hues arranged into blurry rectangles, arranged rectangles in many ways. But what’s moving about Rothko’s rectangles is the commitment. He died three years before AC/DC formed. He had more of a thing for Schubert than Australian metal. But if they found themselves at the same table at a wedding, Angus Young and Mark Rothko could have bonded. That sounds like a cool table. Also seated there is the Ramones — whose shows were one 60-minute punk squall broken by shouts of “OneTwoThree!” Since this is a large table (please don’t ask who the Ramones, Mark Rothko and AC/DC would know in common to be invited to the same wedding), seat Agatha Christie there, too.
Picking over their rubbery chickens, they’d recognize a shared philosophy: Insanity is not always doing one thing over and over, and expecting different results. Doing one thing can mean refinement, even appreciation. Christie likely wrote at least one mystery without a dead body in a train, steamship, boarding school or coastal mansion, without the usual suspects or a tweedy inspector, but I don’t want to read it. She was so devoted to one thing, for 50 years, that reading enough Christie and identifying the mechanics that make it all interesting, and not the killer, is the fun part.
These are one-track minds.
These are artists who rarely wander, and somehow both artist and audience never seem to care. Adoringly so. To say both like a good formula doesn’t capture this intense bond. You get a feeling both parties are tucked beneath a warm blanket. There’s no more disappointment here than realizing that waves keep coming, and coming. Knowing that behind every swell is always another is soothing.
But when is it just lazy?
My mind immediately goes to decades of “Friday the 13th” movies in which a masked killer hunts countless variations of the same teenagers in the first movie, only allowing for a tweak here or there: killer in 3D, killer in New York City, killer in space. Why are those lifeless while, say, the latest Steven Soderbergh crime movie “Black Bag,” as effortless and familiar as any Soderbergh crime flick from two decades ago, is still satisfying? Because Soderbergh is playing variations on a theme, a style or a structure, appearing to surprise himself that he can stretch it as far as he does.
As serial killer franchises go (and there are good ones), the “Friday the 13th” franchise was never that curious about itself. Comparatively, AC/DC, which nobody would accuse of being curious, can still get your blood surging because they still locate something exciting in two chords.
At that wedding table, I imagine Young pulls out his cell phone and Christie peeks over and notices that his home screen is one of Monet’s countless haystacks, and she smiles knowingly.
An artist who repeats over and over again and rarely bores is the artist who is always seeing, unwilling to move on until they explore an idea completely — maybe for a lifetime. It’s as if they have been locked into a long conversation with the idea itself. Pick up nearly any big multi-disc jazz reissue and you hear this playing out in real time, with the same musicians picking over one or two songs again and again, sometimes with inaudible differences. Jim Nutt, the Chicago Imagist, now 86, made so many paintings of female heads, it’s like its own genre. Woody Allen, for years on end, seemed to shoot the same movie about the same characters having the same tics in the same city (New York City), you could have been fooled into thinking he was the most well-adjusted filmmaker ever. Part of the genius of blues and country artists is in the million ways they say only a few things.
There’s a new Lana Del Rey song with a funny line warily bemoaning: “All these country singers / And their lonely rides to Houston.” Part of the joke is that Lana Del Rey herself is the AC/DC of contemporary pop stars — thrillingly so. Wary is her thing. Some might say her only thing. Her songs rarely go beyond a light gallup, her tone is always breathy and lush. My daughter groans whenever I ask Siri to play Lana; it’s like I’m calling up the same song once again. Yet I don’t hear any boredom in Lana Del Rey’s sound. She is so thoroughly exploring the limits of contemporary ballads, you hang on every digression or alteration — a fast electronic hiccup, a touch of Ennio Morricone twang.
The other day, I was talking to Chicago artist Theaster Gates and asked why he repeats himself so often, especially with his pottery. He mentioned growing up in a Baptist church where the pastor would riff on a single Bible verse for hours. He thinks of his own repetition as meditating on a single thought, or like a marker he carries through life: the Pledge of Allegiance, he said, means one thing when you’re 6, but something else when you’re 16, and another thing entirely if you fight in a war.
We put a premium on artists who can’t sit still, who show endless range and seem to switch hit every time at bat. David Bowie, for instance, is our contemporary ideal of an artist who refused to rest on laurels and do one thing well. Bowie, like Prince, like Bob Dylan, gravitated to change with an almost evolutionary fear — if you don’t adapt, eventually you become irrelevant and get eaten.
But the artist who repeats obsessively leans into a different truism: If every work of art is made up of only a handful of fresh thoughts, then what matters is your arrangement. Every R.L. Stine “Goosebumps” book is only slightly different than any other. Characters in novels by Haruki Murakami — who refers to his own repetition as meditation — make a lot of omelettes and listen to a lot of jazz. John Irving’s characters get visited by bears. Alfred Hitchcock — who once remade his own film (“The Man Who Knew Too Much”) — never met a mistaken identity he wouldn’t explore. Elin Hilderbrand likes unease in paradise. John Carpenter has made too many variations on “Rio Bravo” to count. I have never been able to distinguish between Jackson Pollock’s splatters. The amazing Art Preserve in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an extension of the Kohler Arts Center, is several floors of psychosis and artists who, oh, decide to paint only skulls or sculpt clay into only religious figures.
I love that, not despite the predictability but because of it.
I insist I want variety in everything — eating, visiting, etc. — and yet one of the best feelings is seeing a well-trodden trail in a dense forest. Plenty of consumer studies bear this out: We say we long for new experiences but don’t mind the same thing again and again. If you love something enough, you tend to change alongside it; if you’re lucky, you notice those changes every time you return.
AC/DC only ever sounds like AC/DC, and in a world being upended, that’s a form of life insurance. Listening to their early stuff now, I hear cave men with guitars, but with the newer songs, rock stars with private jets, though really it’s one long thump and always should be. Crunch, thump, hell, blood, thump, back in black, high voltage, crunch, live wire, thump, let there be rock — ad infinitum.
For those about to rock, I salute you.
AC/DC’s Power Up Tour is 8 p.m. May 24 at Soldier Field, 1410 Special Olympics Drive; www.soldierfield.com
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com