Editor's Note: This article was originally published in 2020 for the 40th anniversary of Back in Black and was updated in 2025 to reflect its 45th anniversary.

Back In Black is not a perfect album, but it may be the perfect rock album. What does that say about rock? Probably something about its built-in sexism circa 1980, with the level of horniness both constant and complacent for a band as elemental as AC/DC, more akin to a hostile work environment or catcalling or "locker room talk" than any singular artistic expression of coitus or the overpowering desire for it.

"You Shook Me All Night Long" — which is not a bad choice for the best rock 'n' roll song of all time — transcends the petty bra-snapping of surroundings like "Given the Dog a Bone" and "What You Do for Money Honey" by not only giving their object of desire some description ("American thighs" is probably their most important contribution to our language) but even some dialogue ("she told me to come but I was already there"). You're not going to get apologies from a band who recorded and released their comeback album in all of five months after their lead singer died. Especially not when his replacement, Brian Johnson, literally sings the words "I never die," as if explaining why he's more cut out for the position.

AC/DC's 50-times-platinum masterpiece could be the definitive rock album simply for being equidistant from Led Zeppelin IV and Nirvana's Nevermind. Kick, snare, kick, snare, kick, snare is rarely as primitive or as powerful as when "You Shook Me All Night Long" loses its intro like tearaway pants. Slow it down to what we now know to be hip-hop speed and you get "Back In Black," a noncontroversial nomination for the greatest guitar riff of all time, which only Wayne Campbell can really decide.

Ease it down even more and you get the hungover, bluesy crawl of "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution," which didn't really catch on as a bumper sticker but trudges the album to a close with the confidence as if it did. Back In Black being 45 perfectly parallels its most loyal demographic being in their 60s or 70s, an always-in-lockstep cosplay of themselves 20 years younger.

Bon Scott choked on his vomit in the passenger seat after a drinking binge, and less than half a year later, the guy who filled his shoes sang "Have a Drink on Me." There wasn't any real hesitation; if anything it weirded out the record company more when AC/DC were going to make their album cover entirely black in tribute. (They were asked to at least provide an outline of the AC/DC logo over it; oh, branding.) Johnson was tasked with writing a tribute song, but not "morbid," so "it has to be a celebration." What a job.

"Back In Black," though, the other song on this album that wouldn't be a bad choice for the best rock 'n' roll song of all time, more than fulfills this prophecy. We may as well go ahead and nominate it for the even more likely Best Riff of All Time award. It makes a great hip-hop song too, though you wouldn't know it from any official releases since these knuckleheads are against sampling. Search YouTube to find Eminem and the Beastie Boys kicking it like the stomping groove deserves.

But the lyrics of "Back In Black" — which, along with "Hells Bells" and "Noise Pollution," comprise the album's only verbiage not directed at women — are perhaps the only time AC/DC was ever mysterious or impressionistic. Given, Steven Tyler and Anthony Kiedis rap things like "nine lives, cat's eyes" all the time. But for a band this literal, this nearly artless in their glandular pursuits, it's Picasso.

AC/DC identified something in punk and new wave. From Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath to Deep Purple and even Aerosmith at their most talk-box spacy, hard rock in the 1970s was celebrated for its psychedelic excess — its pretensions; elongated, folksy mandolin intros; the simulated endlessness of drum soloing; "jams." But while AC/DC surely imbibed plenty of the same substances, they ran a no-nonsense assembly line of riffs compiled like car parts into well-oiled machines, no dirt or mess. There's definitely some Ramones in that. If not for Kiss, you might even be able to say they were the first of this kind, and that Back In Black may have foreseen the coldness of Reagan in its defiance of feeling; for a tribute to a fallen friend, they didn't even allow a single ballad.

"Back In Black" may as well be about how stylish they looked at Bon Scott's funeral. But it's clear that Scott wouldn't have blinked; if anything, he would've climbed out of the casket to shriek "Shoot to Thrill" himself. And in a way, Back in Black may have taken a longtime trope to its ultimate conclusion: Lead singers may succumb to mortality, but rock 'n' roll would never.