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Is AC/DC a Metal or Rock Band?

Metal or Rock?

  • Metal

    Votes: 24 4.5%

  • Rock

    Votes: 507 95.5%
  • Total voters
    531
  • Poll closed .
Pyro

Pyro

God help us the mods are making weekend threads
Member
Jul 30, 2018
14,505
United States
As you may or may not know, DOOM (1993) is one of my favorite games of all time. It's the perfect game for pairing some music or a podcast with some good 'ol Ultra-Violence and turning my brain off for a bit.

Despite knowing for years that the game had pretty much stolen lots of its MIDI OST from popular Metal music of the time, I only recently started to look into it. And it's kinda hilariously brazen looking back:





Nestled in that video though is an AC/DC song. Now I'm no expert on Metal, so as a more casual fan of the genre it seems weird to me seeing them alongside names like Slayer, Megadeth, Pantera, etc. They strike me as more of a rock n' roll band, but I wonder if that's just because of their success and seemingly everyone knowing who they are.

But what say you Era?

PS - I made a Spotify playlist of all the songs I could in the video if anyone is interested in listening (it's now my go to for playing DOOM on PS4). Not all of the songs in the YT video seem to be on the service however, and there are longer videos with more comparisons, but for the sake of brevity I figured I'd just stick with an >10 minute video. I'll be adding more songs to the playlist soon.

 
Volimar

Volimar

volunteer forum janitor
Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,325
You might be able to find a better niche than just rock but they're not metal...
 
Ruisu

Ruisu

Banned
Aug 1, 2019
5,535
Brasil
On the most technical level they are a metal band, but they don't sound anything like most metal bands I know of.
 
Bitanator

Bitanator

Member
Oct 27, 2017
10,041
There's this genre called hard rock...

ACDC rock band,dable in metal vibes here and there in a lot of their songs. Great headbanging band
 
joedick

joedick

Member
Mar 19, 2018
1,382
Might have been metal in the 70s (if there was such a term), but definitely good ol rock n roll these days
 
Timeaisis

Timeaisis

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
6,139
Austin, TX
Kind of both.

To understand the answer to this question you have to understand the history of metal and rock and roll. Metal didn't really exist in the present sense as it does today back when AC/DC started. They were classified as hard rock, and have been ever since. Even bands that are considered to have been metal were not thought of as metal at the time (Black Sabbath, for example).

But if we examine the sound of AC/DC and compare to contemporary bands that are considered metal (like, Iron Maiden, for example) the similarities are pretty near, albeit much less technicality in AC/DC songs.

So I'd consider them hard rock. But if someone wanted to call them early metal, I would not argue with them. AC/DC is about as metal as Metallica was metal in the 90s.
 
valuv

valuv

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,604
They're clearly Rock. A better discussion would be whether Motorhead are Rock or Metal. Most consider them Metal but the band considered themselves Rock. There's a decent argument to both sides.
 
captive

captive

Member
Oct 25, 2017
16,991
Houston
ACDC is hard rock.

vulva said:
They're clearly Rock. A better discussion would be whether Motorhead are Rock or Metal. Most consider them Metal but the band considered themselves Rock. There's a decent argument to both sides.
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they're literally one of the biggest bands from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.
 
Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
5,988
California
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Watevaman

Watevaman

Member
Oct 30, 2017
866
I would say rock/hard rock but to be honest the distinction between some rock and metal is so narrow that it's hard to say. There's a lot of groups where you can instantly tell, but for others (AC/DC and Motorhead as already stated) it's hard to define them. What is it that makes them rock vs. metal? Instrumentation, lyrical content, theatrics, etc.?
 
skeezx

skeezx

Member
Oct 27, 2017
20,126
i'd imagine if i were a 16 year old in 1981 i'd say what's wrong with you, ac/dc is metal AF

but even adult contemporary stations play them and not metallica so... yeah
 
Eros

Eros

Member
Oct 27, 2017
9,656
not even joking this is the first time i've seen it asked if ac/dc is metal.
 
Pixis

Pixis

Member
Oct 31, 2017
355
Echo many of the sentiments in here - metal within the context of their time but now much more considered hard rock - they are the quintessential rock and roll band. They are also more hard rock given much of their music is heavily inspired by early blues rock (e.g Chuck Berry).

In any case, probably my favourite band of all time. Especially the absolute king of rhythm guitar Mr Malcolm Young. RIP.
 
EloKa

EloKa

GSP
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
1,905
The 3 big differnces between Rock and (its subgenre) Metal are: Tempo, Rhythm and whether or not you use Power Chords.
Those main differences vary from song to song but in general ACDC is clearly on the side of beeing a (hard) Rock band.


Other differences are that ACDC uses mostly the pentatonic scale with low distortion but high gains which gives them their typical clean but lound sound. Metal is mostly modal harmonics with huge distortion. ACDC is also using mostly a blues chord progression with 4/4 time signature which is pretty uncommon in metal. And they have always used a variation of the G-Chord which is called "Rock-G" because it either sounds better or Angus Young was kinda lazy cause it's easier to play. Probably both.
 
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