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AC / DC are far from the only Australian musicians who have achieved success outside their country: world famous pop stars are Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia and Sia, concerts of the rock band INXS have gathered entire stadiums, and there is no figure in the world of post-punk and alternative music. equal to Nick Cave. Yet it was AC / DC who blazed the trail for everyone else in the 1970s. And the success of this group, in truth, is on some fundamentally different level: suffice it to say that the album “Back in Black” is consistently among the ten best-selling releases of all time, alongside Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and “Hotel California »Of the Eagles group.

AC / DC’s founders and main musicians Malcolm and Angus Young were born in the UK. They moved to Australia as children, when in 1963 the large Young family traveled to the other side of the world in search of a better life. The first to become famous in popular music was George Young, the older brother of Malcolm and Angus, who was never part of the official lineup of AC / DC. In the 1960s, he played in the garage band The Easybeats, which claimed the status of the Australian Beatles, and composed, among other things, the wonderful, easy and charming hit “Friday on My Mind”. George’s success inspired the younger brothers to take up guitars too – however, at first they could not even suspect that they would become the absolute champions of the Australian music export.

Perhaps the most Australian thing to show up in AC / DC is the comic school uniform with short pants that Angus Young has regularly worn on stage; such suits were really worn by Sydney elementary school students. Otherwise, their work is an absolutely cosmopolitan weighted blues-rock, in which they always fanatically followed the once-chosen musical and poetic principles. The musical ones were just formulated by the Young brothers: energetic riffs, straightforward rhythm, power chords – when the middle sound is removed from the triad, and the remaining ones are definitely not colored in either minor or major, – mostly organized in a standard square.

Another British immigrant, vocalist Bon Scott, who called the lyrics of his songs “outhouse poetry”, was responsible for the poetic principles. This meant: extremely low humor (in the AC / DC repertoire there was, for example, the composition “Crabsody in Blue” – a portmanteau from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in the Blues” and the words crabs, “pubic lice”), an abundance of erotic plots (the hit “Whole Lotta Rosie ”narrated about the night Scott spent with a prostituted plus-size woman), as well as the poetics of drunken fights and other alcoholic intoxication. The frontman of AC / DC lived as he sang: “toilet poetry” in the overwhelming majority of cases had an almost reportage character.

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Bush’s ballads are the most famous and recognizable genre of Australian literature. Its origins lie in the folk poetry of the first settlers who were exiled to Australia from Great Britain from the end of the 18th century and throughout the first half of the 19th century. Australia at first was a foreign land for exiles, and their desire for freedom and comradeship inspired them:

The English word bush, from which the ballads got their name, meaning “thickets”, “forest”, acquired a new meaning in Australia: wild, undeveloped territory, and then wider – the countryside in its opposition to the city. It was in the bush that fugitive exiles were hiding, escaping from hard labor. As the colonies were settled, rebels from the settlers joined them, breaking the law. From the word “bush” they got their Australian name – bushrangers, forest robbers. In folklore, they are often represented as Australian Robin Hoods, who robbed the rich and helped the poor. The most famous bushranger was Ned Kelly: paintings by Sidney Nolan played an important role in the mythologization of his image.

In the second half of the 19th century, as the development of the continent proceeded and the generation of people for whom Australia became their home grew, the folklore tradition was continued by the poets of the Australian colonies. They praised the heroism of the pioneers:

The authors of the ballads also poeticized the daily life of the pioneer settlers – farmers who had already settled down but had to cope with the harsh conditions of the frontier. The archetypal image is the swagman hobo who goes from farm to farm with a swag roller in search of work. He is immortalized in the song-ballad “Dancer Matilda” by Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941), which at one time even claimed the role of the anthem of Australia. It contains the same theme of freedom and contempt for the authorities as in folk poetry, but the text is filled with Australian flavor and slang: for example, Matilda is the Australian name for swagman’s roll, and “waltzing with Matilda” means “pulling the roll”.

Another classic by Paterson is the ballad The Snowy River Boy, which depicts the hunt for wild horses and praises the courage and fearlessness of the colonists.

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