Shrödinger's Rockers: AC/DC and the Heisenberg Principle
Sometimes the Gimmick Sneaks in a Heavy Payload
Abstract: This paper examines AC/DC through the lens of quantum mechanics, arguing that their cultural position exists in permanent superposition between 'dumb' and 'genius,' and that critical observation inevitably collapses this wave function into reductive binaries that fail to capture the band's essential nature.
[RECORD SCRATCH]
Okay, who are we kidding?
Look, somewhere right now, someone is driving a Ford down a highway with "Highway to Hell" rattling the speakers. They're not thinking about Antipodean immigrant narratives or George Young's strategic production choices or the blues as infrastructure versus spectacle. They're just driving. The music works. That's it. That's the whole story.
But we can't leave it there, can we? Because AC/DC shouldn't work as well as they do. Three chords. Lyrics about big balls. A guy in a school uniform. This is objectively stupid music that has somehow colonized the entire planet's reptile brain. How?
Enter George Young—Scottish immigrant, Easybeats survivor, older brother with something to prove. He watched his own band chase sophistication and fracture under the weight of changing trends and label pressure. The Easybeats had Australia eating out of their hands, then chased international success and splintered. George learned what didn't work: overreach, inconsistency, trying to be too many things.
So when Malcolm and Angus started their thing in 1973, George didn't encourage experimentation. He encouraged compression. Strip it down. Make it bulletproof. Build something the industry can't corrupt because there's nothing extra to strip away. He co-produced their first six albums—High Voltage through Powerage—and in doing so, engineered their refusal as a strategy.
"AC/DC was his revenge," wrote biographer Clinton Walker. Not revenge as bitterness—revenge as doing it right the second time. George honed them into what he called "a coherent, commercially viable entity." He even suggested the bagpipes on "It's a Long Way to the Top," the detail that makes that song impossible to forget.
So the "dumbness" was engineered. The simplicity was sophisticated survivalism. The meat-and-potatoes aesthetic was actually—
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—and there we go again. We're doing it. Turning bar-band rock into a doctoral thesis. This is what happens when overeducated people love AC/DC: we can't just enjoy the hammer, we have to explain the physics of leverage and the metallurgy of the handle and the ergonomics of the grip, not to mention the sociology of the marketing.
That said, both readings are true. George Young did strategically shape their sound and helped build something unbreakable that the industry couldn't chew up and spit out. Stripping down to essentials wasn't laziness; it was armor. Malcolm's rhythm guitar is extraordinarily disciplined. The "stupid" aesthetic required serious craft to maintain. And yet—and yet—Angus wore the school uniform because his sister Margaret suggested it and it looked funny. "Big Balls" is a juvenile masterpiece, but layer in the immigrant grit, the working-class Scottish roots transplanted to Sydney, and suddenly it's a sly wink at the establishment. The band's refusal to evolve wasn't stagnation; it was defiance. Three chords as a middle finger to prog rock excess. Like the Trojan Horse, the gimmick sneaks in a heavy payload.
The problem is we can't hold both truths simultaneously. Like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: measure the momentum (the visceral gut-punch of "Thunderstruck," the Ford at 80 mph, windows down, volume at 7) and you lose the position (the cultural context, the production choices, the immigrant story, George's Easybeats trauma). Measure the position and the momentum evaporates into classroom air. Try to measure both and you get... well, you get this article.
Or think of it as Schrödinger's cat: AC/DC exists in a sealed box labeled ROCK. Inside, they are simultaneously stupid AND brilliant. The Ford driver never opens the box—just turns it up. But we can't help ourselves. We pry it open with analysis, and the superposition collapses. The vibration stops, and all that's left is either the dumb joke or the divine riff. Both were there, humming together, until we looked.
Susanna Wallumrød slowed down "It's a Long Way to the Top" until it became a lament. Mark Kozelek turned "Rock 'n' Roll Singer" into a hymn. Both found genuine pathos buried in the riffs. They weren't wrong—the sadness was always there, under the volume. But they fundamentally transformed the songs by removing the very thing that made them work: the refusal to acknowledge the sadness, the insistence on grinding forward anyway.
These covers are experiments that change the state of the particle. Analysis as cooling process—remove the heat, slow the molecules, and pathos condenses like dew on a windshield. The temperature drops from dashboard-in-July to seminar-room-in-November, and the material enters a different phase. Liquid to solid. Electricity to archaeology.
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We're doing the same thing with our analysis. Finding things that are genuinely there—George's experience, the immigrant context, the strategic minimalism, the Scottish working-class displacement in suburban Sydney—but in the process, losing the thing that makes AC/DC... well, AC/DC: the absolute commitment to not giving a shit about any of this.
Their bass player's job really is boring. That's not a metaphor for industrial labor or devotion to craft or the spiritual discipline of repetition. It's just boring. But it's also essential. Both things, no oscillation needed. No deeper meaning required.
The three cowboy chords really are clichéd. Beginners learn them at Boy Scout camp. Wes Anderson could film them around a fire in pastel twilight. But they also powered decades of stadium shows and became anthemic through sheer repetitive force. Both things. Dumb and effective. Obvious and undeniable.
The band really is dumb. And sophisticated. And dumb. The seesaw doesn't stop because we want a conclusion. The trampoline keeps flexing.
So what does this say about meaning itself? Maybe that analysis is inherently unstable—a trampoline that flexes and warps under the weight of too much thinking, occasionally depositing the analyst flat on their back in the backyard while someone films it for posterity. We build elaborate theoretical frameworks to explain why simple things move us, and in building them, we move further from the original experience.
The guy in the Ford has no framework. He just has the music, and the road, and the moment. The sound hits his body and his foot goes down and that's the complete circuit.
But he also doesn't have this—this weird pleasure of watching your own brain tie itself in knots, of finding George Young's revenge plot and the Easybeats connection and the quantum mechanics metaphor that almost works. He doesn't get to experience AC/DC as both dumb and smart, because he never asked the question.
So maybe we're not wrong to overanalyze. We're just doing something different—something incompatible with the original experience but valid in its own way. Like covering AC/DC on solo piano: you lose the thunder, but you find something else. You change the temperature and discover what condenses out.
We tell ourselves he's the lucky one, that he gets the real thing. But maybe he's just the control group, and we're the experiment—the proof that rock can still mutate into meaning, that the same three chords can power both the highway and the footnote, the body and the brain, the amp and the essay.
The meaning collapses. The trampoline flexes. Someone lands wrong and becomes a viral TikTok. We keep jumping anyway.
Because somewhere, always, someone is slapping an 8-track of Powerage into a Ford and rolling down the highway, and they don't need any of this.
But we can't be them anymore.
So we write zines about quantum mechanics and three-chord rock, and we accept that we've exiled ourselves from the very thing we love, and we do it anyway, because the analysis is the love letter, even if it's written in a language the recipient doesn't speak.
The vibration continues. Just at a different frequency.
[FADE OUT: "It's a Long Way to the Top" plays, but you're not sure if it's the original or a cover, but there's a bagpipe wail, and somehow that's perfect]
CONTRIBUTORS: Four people who should probably just put on Back In Black and shut up