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" Rumors have been swirling that AC/DC was about to come to an end. Malcolm Young, a founding member and the rhythm guitarist of the band, is suffering from the complications of a stroke, including a nastily placed blood clot that has hampered his level of play. Fortunately the band has denied the rumors, saying &amp;quot;The band will continue to make music.&amp;quot; Those who believed that AC/DC had completed their mission on this earth were mistaken. In hindsight, the rumors were obviously ridiculous. AC/DC is, was and always shall be indestructible.  You cannot kill AC/DC anymore than you can kill rock&amp;#039;n&amp;#039;roll. The death of rock has been announced many, many times before but it always comes back to be killed again. Its first obituary was published right around the time of its birth, on February 3, 1959, when the Big Bopper, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly had their famous plane crash. It died again with Jim Morrison, with Jon Bonham, with Elvis, with Kurt Cobain, with disco, with American Pie, with the Beatles breaking up. In the press at least, rock&amp;#039;n&amp;#039;roll had already died at least a half-dozen times by the time AC/DC formed in 1973. They have had a forty year career, of the widest possible success, playing in a postmortem medium.  And in a way AC/DC was a postmortem band, which is why they&amp;#039;ll never die. They have barely changed over the course of their forty years, even when their lead singer passed away in 1980. Songs from 1974&amp;#039;s TNT or 2008&amp;#039;s Black Ice are much the same. Their sound has not &amp;quot;developed.&amp;quot; They have not gone through &amp;quot;periods.&amp;quot; When Angus Young put on his deranged schoolboy look, and they figured out that it worked, he wore it at every show afterwards, even as he grew into an old man in a deranged schoolboy uniform. They stick with what they know and what they know their audiences want: power chords, melodies, loudness, the heavy metal badassery kept comfortably in check with familiarity. Every song is written to be the first song you hear when you walk into a stripclub. They see no reason to grow as artists and therefore they never embarrassed themselves by following fads. An AC/DC album is an AC/DC album. Always.  Because of that constancy, they have been absolutely huge, huge on a scale that it&amp;#039;s actually hard to imagine from the point of view of 2014. They have sold way, way more than 180 million albums. In 1991, they played to an audience of 1.6 million people in Moscow. To put that in perspective, it&amp;#039;s as if every man, woman and child in the city of Philadelphia went to the same concert. They influenced everybody across multiple genres--heavy metal, alternative rock. If you find yourself in a small town, in a dive bar, and they have a live rock&amp;#039;n&amp;#039;roll band, that band, on some level, wants to be AC/DC. They are maybe the last rock band that can legitimately claim to have conquered the world. Their timing has been perfect. They hit the sweet spot where globalization and taste and technology allowed for the creation of artists that everybody listened to. That time has now passed. Nostalgia for it remains ferocious.  Certainly nothing as minor as mere stroke is going to finish them off. Their sheer capacity for endurance is astonishing. After Back in Black they could have stopped making songs. They could have retired forever. They could have become bored with themselves. They could have become bored with their audience. They never did. They kept writing actual songs. They kept touring. They never mutated, like the Rolling Stones, into a tribute band to themselves. And that is why, in all likelihood, they will never go. They give the world what it wants, and the world will always want a band like AC/DC. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a28288/long-live-ac-dc/>