What is the AC/DC song “Back in Black” about?
(Source: Far Out / Harry Potts)
With its powerful riff that hits us from the start, AC/DC’s 1980 song “Back in Black” became an instant classic, perhaps defining the hard rock genre better than any song before or since. Add to its trademark three-chord opening a crashing chorus from Brian Johnson and a storming guitar solo from Angus Young, and it’s easy to see why the song transcended both the band and their anthemic brand of rocking out.
Singer Johnson worked tirelessly in the studio to perfect his vocals on the track, especially since it was one of the first songs he had written and recorded with Angus and Malcolm Young since the death of former AC/DC frontman Bon Scott. In fact, Scott was the inspiration for “Back in Black” as the Young brothers wanted a song that paid tribute to their former bandmate.
“The guys wanted it to be a good rock record in memory of Bon,” Johnson explained NME in 2020, “but without all the grease, without all the crap and bullshit that usually comes with it.” Sentimentality wasn’t exactly a rock ‘n’ roll way to deal with grief, and a cheesy power ballad wasn’t exactly the band’s way of handling things anyway.
At the same time, Johnson has previously described that part of his writing brief was to avoid anything “morbid.” The song couldn’t be too dark. It had to be “a celebration” of Scott’s life.
And so Johnson began to extol his predecessor’s penchant for living life to the limit. Scott pushed the human body beyond its limits in the name of hedonism, seemingly cheating death until it finally succumbed to his lifestyle. The lyrical starting point for “Back in Black” was therefore the couplet “I got nine lives / Cat’s eyes.”
From that metaphor flowed words about all the ways a drug-addicted rock star escaped the Grim Reaper. Scott’s band subverted a song that was supposed to be about his untimely death by focusing exclusively on the miraculous escape he seemed to have accomplished in the years before.
So what does the title of the song mean?
If “Back in Black” is about the band refusing to accept the dark side of death, then the song’s central metaphor of being “in black” seems like a fun way to express that. The truth is that despite all the celebration in the song, Scott’s musical brothers were still mourning him. As Angus Young later admitted, “It was like losing a family member.”
Johnson may sing about being “free from the noose” and urge the world to “forget the hearse,” but Scott’s death still happened. His bandmates may be laughing in the face of death in the song, but recording it months after the tragedy was still extremely tough.
Although most of the lyrics are full of carefree abandon, the title is a clear reference to Scott’s death. The Young brothers consciously and intentionally chose “Back in Black” as the title track for the band’s new album before it was even completed. “They wanted the album to be black,” Johnson said. AC/DC were back and better than ever, but they were also dressed in black to address the elephant in the room.
The song and album are tokens of the respect the group paid to their late friend and frontman in the best way they knew how. Still, hard rock’s greatest band wasn’t downbeat. As much as they missed Scott, it was their duty to send him off with a firework display of guitar blasts and vocal screams as only they could.
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