The economic environment has gotten to the point where GM is being talked about in the past tense. CNN is a barrage of red-fonted gloom. The Dow is flushing in a daily swirl. Men are having babies (I saw the guy, err, well, not exactly a guy, on Barbara Walters). TLC did a two-hour documentary about a man in Java who suffers from warts so badly; it appeared tree roots are growing from his body (the “tree man” – Google it).
Business is warty too, but not growing. Retail sales have dropped lower than even after even 9/11. Unemployment is swelling. Bankrupt giants fill the biz news and billionaires are forced to live like millionaires. Golden parachutes aren’t opening. A government that was so decisive in war is now frozen by the fear it was so good at spreading just a few years ago. With every paper that gets delivered – bad news on the doorstep (thank you Don McLean, American Pie). Even online universities (I’ve been predicting this for 10 years) are becoming legit: See Western Governors University (https://www.wgu.edu).
When everything we thought we knew is questioned and the experts are baffled and lost; when our leaders have no solutions; when our future looks so bleak, where do we turn?
AC/DC
Take it out on the dashboard or your steering wheel. Five minutes of “You Shook Me All Night Long” or “Thunderstruck” will help you forget that your 401k is now worth 101c. When they hand you that pink slip, crank up “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and chase it with “Stiff Upper Lip.”
It has nothing to do with the sales of their new CD “Black Ice,” AC/DC is hotter than every episode of American Idol combined (sorry Paula). You can go back to “Highway to Hell” or “Back in Black,” or you can listen to the new “Rock n’ Roll Train” and try to imagine how many years went down between that song and “Hell’s Bells.” Go back to before Brian Johnson to when Bon Scott was still vertical and screaming. Back to 1973 and Malcolm and Angus Young as teenagers in Sydney, Australia, back to when Robert Plant sang like a wicked angel and Pete Townsend sliced his hands on the cords and Mick Jagger didn’t look like Lilly Tomlin. Few AC/DC songs sound like the music of 60-year old men – because it is isn’t. It has no timeframe. Clocks and calendars measure rational existence. Emotional existence is measured in feelings and memories. That stuff gets all blended like a whirled peas.
AC/DC churns out patented musical aggression like angry 20-something rockers beating you with stupidly simple lyrics about sex and drinking and crushing guitar riffs that hit you in the face like waves of pheromone-soaked roofing nails. It’s the smell of internal combustion ridden by a voice that can only belong to someone your mother doesn’t want to know. My old football coach used to say that nothing good ever happens after midnight. If that were true, AC/DC would have no material.
No one ever mistakes an AC/DC song for any other band. And many bands have tried over the last twenty-five years. When others go on geriatric reunion tours, fronting assisted-living crowds, AC/DC is like a fresh scraped elbow gotten while skateboarding in a bad neighborhood – after midnight.
AC/DC is the most popular active rock band in the country based on hardcore cash and cross-age popularity. They are the soundtrack tooth-breaking hits during football games on ESPN. They are iconoclastic, only selling albums (that last on in Walmart) and not on iTunes. They sound like what God had in mind when he delegated the invention of Rock & Roll to the devil and Robert Johnson. They deliver the nasty goods, and do it while little Angus Young – deep into AARP territory – wears a schoolboy uniform and sweats like a felon in church as he squeezes “T.N.T.” out of a Gibson SG.
In these difficult times, what can businesses learn from AC/DC?
Do what you are good at doing. Don’t get caught up in a new phase every time a consultant roams by. Business is stupidly simple most of the time: Sell something (product or service) that solves your customer’s problem. Create something worth paying for. Don’t just talk about your brand, be it. Deliver. Deliver. Deliver.
Bottom line: If you bring something people really want, the economy is irrelevant.
AC/DC is a classic MBA course. Perhaps Harvard Business School should bring in Angus, Malcolm and Brian to give a little seminar. Then again, that seminar has been playing at 180dB’s for the last quarter century.
Tags: Entertainment, In The News, Music