Entertainment

AC/DC bring high voltage rock 'n' roll hits to the masses at the Rose Bowl

Published

8 months ago

April 20, 2025

AC/DC bring high voltage rock 'n' roll hits to the masses at the Rose Bowl

Precious few bands can fill a stadium 52 years into their career — let alone play to an audience heavily populated by parents and their children, both generations sporting red devil horn headbands and cheering for 77-year-old singer Brian Johnson and white-haired guitar icon Angus Young, 70.

But AC/DC did just that, playing 21 instantly recognizable sing-along tunes of considerable heaviness — the majority of them classic rock radio staples and cultural touchstones — rendered with a power and passion that belies their many decades of service. Kicking off with 1978’s “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It),” Young, in his trademark schoolboy outfit (red velvet for this show) with the recognizable black and white Gibson SG, took the stage to thunderous appreciation.

Next was “Back in Black,” the song and album that marked Johnson’s 1980 entrée to the lineup. The frontman proved expressive and animated despite serious hearing issues that sidelined him for a few scary years, and a voice that, understandably, doesn’t always have the sustain and power of earlier days. The quintet played a few tracks from their latest, 2020’s “Power Up,” but as expected and appreciated, the hits ruled, from “Shot Down to Flames” to “Hells Bells” to latter-day crowd favorite “Thunderstruck.”

AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson and guitarist Angus Young perform at the Rose Bowl on April 18, 2025 in Pasadena, Calif.

(Eric Thayer/For The Times)

The band’s set, despite the relentless, strident perfection and power of the rhythm section, wasn’t a quick flow, with fairly frequent darkened-stage breaks between songs. The second half of the two-hour-plus performance proved the stronger — Johnson’s energy seemingly renewed on this third show of 13 for this leg of the Power Up tour.

Fans cheer as AC/DC performs at the Rose Bowl on April 18, 2025 in Pasadena, Calif.

The band’s hardcore devotees may wonder if AC/DC may be slightly callous or merely driven, as their career suggests. Other fans don’t know or care about the lineup’s backstory, which took its first devastating turn in February 1980 with the death of singer Bon Scott, 33. In less than six months, with new frontman Johnson, previously of Brit band Geordie, AC/DC released what would become one of the best-selling albums in history, “Back in Black,” their first of 11 LPs (to date) with Johnson.

Like a Dickensian Andy Capp, Johnson is an uber-charming rogue, an everyman bluesy belter whose winking humor with a hint of the scoundrel are not entirely unlike Scott’s demeanor, though each man’s vocals, inflection and stage presence are/were clearly their own. And beloved as such.

AC/DC lead singer Brian Johnson and guitarist Angus Young perform at the Rose Bowl

However, on Feb. 28, 2016, in the midst of AC/DC’s Rock or Bust tour, doctors told Johnson that if he didn’t stop performing immediately, he risked total hearing loss. By May 17, 2016, Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose joined AC/DC as a fill-in vocalist for two dozen shows, a move that shocked many and thrilled others. Seemingly nothing will stop the juggernaut that is AC/DC. They’re at once a band of brothers, literally — founded by Angus and late brother Malcolm Young — but also not. As the middle-aged concertgoer next to me noted: “Angus is all about the money and he and his brother [Malcom] own the band.” That said, it was the fan’s 10^th show across several continents, though he purposely avoided seeing the Rose-fronted version of AC/DC.

Johnson, his hearing issues managed, was back in the fold by 2019, and post-pandemic, playing live with AC/DC by October 2023. Interestingly, one of the other bands still filling stadiums is indeed Guns N’ Roses. Even more titillating: Rose and guitarist Slash, the Johnson and Young of American rock, were in attendance at the Rose Bowl — their walk through the crowd inciting thousands to gasp and crane their necks for a look at the duo.

But all eyes were onstage for the two-hour-plus show. AC/DC have written winking songs about sexually transmitted diseases (“The Jack”); large women (“Whole Lotta Rosie”); voracious encounters (“You Shook Me All Night Long,” “She’s Got Balls”); and of course, Hell (in the abstract). The tunes are all exuberant, and even with a new era of political correctness, never offensive.

Despite any challenges of health and member attrition, AC/DC remain unstoppable and undeniable — Young’s own version of Chuck Berry’s duckwalk proved his preternatural energy, as did his expected and always lengthy (10 minutes? 15?) solo during “Let There Be Rock.”

At least six songs in the set were made infamous by Scott, including “Sin City,” “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” “Riff Raff,” “Let There Be Rock” and “Highway to Hell,” but they’re so much a part of the band’s oeuvre it matters not that Johnson has been singing them longer than Scott did. Another constant: AC/DC song titles are frequently convivial lowbrow bon mots — “Have a Drink on Me,” “Hells Bells,” “Stiff Upper Lip” — now so common in the vernacular that AC/DC might have invented the phrases. At this point, who knows; maybe they did.

One valid complaint leveled at the band, is also the (not-so) secret to AC/DC’s strength and continued, deserved worldwide success: they make the same record every time. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And when things do “break,” they’re quickly fixed. Instead of hoped-for drummer Phil Rudd, rounding out the live lineup are drummer Matt Laug, with the band for two years; and skilled journeyman bassist Chris Chaney of Jane’s Addiction infamy. He replaced Cliff Williams, who first joined AC/DC in 1977. And there are two “Young people” on guitar; Angus and his nephew, Stevie, 68, who replaced his uncle Malcolm in the band in 2014.

Fans as AC/DC performs at the Rose Bowl on April 18, 2025 in Pasadena, California.

So, will AC/DC keep going? Clearly, for as long as they can. It’s what they do. Will audiences, fans young and old, keep showing up? They will. It’s what they do. The world circa 2025 could use two hours of an ear-splitting sing-along with 70,000 like-minded denizens, celebrating the working-class joys of booze, broads and rock ‘n’ roll. AC/DC remain the band to deliver that joyful, bipartisan escapism. As Scott sang (and Johnson never has) on the bagpipe-belter “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ‘n’ Roll),” AC/DC indeed hit that top, and remain ensconced there.

AC/DC did their audience a great service in having the Pretty Reckless as openers. Singer Taylor Momsen had a big presence on the massive stage, looking like the Runways’ Cherie Currie circa ’70s, her voice sultry pitch perfect, her commanding voice as genuine as her positively magnetic stage presence. Overheard from a nearby seat: “I was thoroughly blown away.”

Like AC/DC, the band is guitar-driven and write great songs, their approach the perfect blend between accessible rock with the danger, volume and power of metal. It’s a shame AC/DC are so by-the-book onstage, because a Momsen-Johnson duet would be a pairing for the ages.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Published

4 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Movie Review: An electric Timothée Chalamet is the consummate striver in propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothée Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. Suddenly we’re seeing footage of sperm traveling — talk about strivers! — up to an egg. Which morphs, of course, into a pingpong ball.

This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

This image released by A24 shows Timothée Chalamet in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the U.S. cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This image released by A24 shows Gwyneth Paltrow in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channelling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he’s in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

This image released by A24 shows Odessa A'zion in a scene from — This image released by A24 shows Odessa A’zion in a scene from “Marty Supreme.” (A24 via AP)

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We’ll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

“Marty Supreme,” an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association “for language throughout, sexual content, some violent content/bloody images and nudity.” Running time: 149 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Entertainment

Scared of AI? 11 essential books for navigating our new normal

Published

6 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Scared of AI? 11 essential books for navigating our new normal

Despite its ubiquity in our machines and in the news, artificial intelligence remains both a mystery and a source of deep anxiety across occupations and generations. My students, my readers, my colleagues and kids: We are all bewildered by the mix of hype and hope, optimism and doomerism making up the discourse around AI. On the one hand, the quest for artificial general intelligence (AGI) and a utopian belief in the life-improving promise of these emergent technologies; on the other, new algorithmic forms of injustice, the displacement of whole work forces and the limitless sloppification of language, music, video and other aesthetic forms — to say nothing of the threat of human extinction.

The 11 books described below, all published recently, give us helpful sight lines into our turbulent AI age. Some titles are hard-hitting trade nonfiction. One is an academic critique. Others are novels, fictional accounts that imagine how our world is being reshaped (and will be further transformed) by the many technologies grouped under the term artificial intelligence: deepfakes and autonomous drones, AI-enhanced medical scans and self-driving cars.

What all these books have in common is their awareness that AI is transforming our world in ways all too easy to imagine yet nearly impossible to predict.

“Vantage Point: A Novel” by Sara Sligar

(MCD)

“Vantage Point”
By Sara Sligar
MCD: 400 pages, $29

This twisty and brilliantly written thriller about a Maine family spins a tale of ambition, trauma and privilege around the proliferation of so-called deepfakes. Those AI-generated videos play an increasing role in the spread of slanderous accusations and political disinformation in today’s public sphere. Whether the footage at the center of the plot is real or computer-generated is one of the burning questions at the heart of the novel, which plumbs the nature of reality in our age of digital disinformation and virtual selves.

"The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" by Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI”
By Fei-Fei Li
Flatiron: 336 pages, $20

Though it’s been out for two years already, Li’s account of the early years of computer vision and deep learning is a refreshing break from the LLM-centric discourse dominating many discussions of AI. Li shows us the broader computational context of AI’s emergence, explaining key concepts and breakthroughs in vivid, comprehensible detail. “The Worlds I See” is also a scientific autobiography, a compelling account of Li’s personal and intellectual journey from the impoverished circumstances of a Chinese immigrant family life to a wealthy and world-leading university lab.

"Death of the Author: A Novel" by Nnedi Okorafor

“Death of the Author”
By Nnedi Okorafor
William Morrow: 448 pages, $30

“Rusted Robots” is the title of the AI-themed novel-within-a-novel that Zelu, Okorafor’s MFA-wielding protagonist, writes in the wake of a creative and professional calamity. As we encounter excerpts from the book — an Africanfuturist (Okorafor’s preferred term) narrative set in a postapocalyptic West Africa — we learn how the novel achieves phenomenal sales and success that eluded Zelu when she was writing literary fiction, even as Okorafor explores the perils of fame and new fortune. The result is a powerful meditation on the roles of disability, autonomy and privilege in the shaping of literary making in an age when art itself is increasingly threatened by machines.

“Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age”
By Vauhini Vara
Pantheon: 352 pages, $30

Vara’s moving account of her uncanny exchanges with a chatbot about her sister’s death became a viral sensation after it appeared in the Believer in 2021, at the dawn of our LLM-obsessed age. In a series of further essays, reflections and fragments, Vara — a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel “The Immortal King Rao” as well as a former technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal — investigates the role of digital technologies in making us who we are, and may want to become. The book bristles with insight and originality, interspersing Vara’s more journalistic expositions with excurses and fragments curated from the author’s expansive digital life.

"Notes on Infinity: A Novel" by Austin Taylor

“Notes on Infinity: A Novel”
By Austin E. Taylor
Celadon: 400 pages, $30

Though Taylor’s absorbing debut swings more biotech than AI, the novel beautifully captures the extreme techno-optimism of the multibillionaire set — in this case around the possibility of eternal human life. As Zoe, one of the protagonists, notes early on, her interest in a particular professor’s work stems from his success in “using AI neural networks to understand biological neural networks and the processes of thinking.” “Notes on Infinity” combines the traditional campus novel with the zeitgeisty tech novel, featuring Harvard students with “edge” placing “bets on the next Zuck in the dining halls.”

“Ideal Subjects: The Abstract People of AI”
By Olga Goriunova
Minnesota: 232 pages, $32

This deeply researched study examines how AI systems create “abstract people”: statistical confections, subject profiles and anthropomorphic personages that increasingly substitute for humans in digital environments. Goriunova, a cultural theorist and digital curator based in London, examines how these constructed figures and abstractions shape surveillance, governance and everyday life. What is a “digital person,” and why should we care? Goriunova’s answers prove as complex as they are fascinating.

“Annie Bot”
By Sierra Greer
Mariner: 240 pages, $19

The success of the two “M3gan” films suggests a never-ending fascination with human-like cyborgs — though in the case of “Annie Bot,” this fascination is laced with a prurient eroticism that Greer both exploits and cleverly frustrates in her insightful debut. Annie is a sexbot companion operating in autodidactic mode, learning her owner’s sexual proclivities in much the same way AlphaGo perfected the ancient game of Go. At the heart of novel, though, is a thoughtful and darkly humorous meditation on the politics of AI personhood and subjection comparable to Kazuo Ishiguro’s project in “Klara and the Sun,” and with equally harrowing implications.

“Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI”
By Karen Hao
Penguin Press: 496 pages, $32

Hao’s bestselling account of OpenAI and its neoimperial ambitions has received lots of coverage, though it deserves an even wider readership. Formerly an application engineer at a Google spinoff, Hao writes with an insider’s knowledge about the relationship between technological innovation and socioeconomic inequality around the world, from resource-guzzling data centers in Chile to ego-filled executive suites in San Francisco. Full of industry anecdotes and sobering analyses, the book is a riveting introduction to the corporate culture of artificial intelligence and its designs on all of us.

"Who Knows You by Heart: A Novel" by C.J. Farley

“Who Knows You by Heart”
By C. J. Farley
William Morrow: 288 pages, $30

Algorithmic bias and injustice are at the heart of this ingenious novel of technological innovation and corporate malfeasance. Farley’s protagonist is Octavia Crenshaw, a down-on-her-luck coder recently hired by Eustachian, an audio entertainment company exploiting new ways to bring stories to the world. After a series of mishaps and disturbing incidents at the company, Octavia teams up with another coder named Walcott to develop a bias-free AI storytelling model — only to discover the limits of her computational and political ideals. The novel is a riveting critique of Big Tech and its faux-liberal aspirations to correct the world’s wrongs.

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All”
By Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
Little, Brown: 272 pages, $30

Earning its apocalyptic title, this doomerist manifesto by two of the leading figures in the tech world appears in an era saturated with reckless optimism and hype. The book provides a sobering look at issues such as potential misalignments between human designers and the AI systems they release into the world, systems with goals of their own that we may not understand in time to thwart their most catastrophic outcomes. The main message: Be afraid. Be very afraid. The book offers a glimmer of hope as well, albeit a faint one, and concludes with some plainspoken recommendations about proceeding with extreme caution and slowing down.

“UnWorld”
By Jayson Greene
Knopf: 224 pages, $28

This deeply moving novel explores the aftermath of loss and the shape of grief in an age of avatars and algorithmically mediated emotion. When a teenager named Alex dies of mysterious causes, part of the burden of mourning falls on Aviva, an upload virtually confected out of pain. By imagining technologies that can shoulder our memories, our labor and our most shattering emotions, Greene questions whether AI risks nurturing a fantasy that code can heal what hurts in our inner lives. A timely meditation on AI’s allure as an escape hatch from the strain of modern consciousness, the novel quietly insists that any lasting tranquility must still be cultivated from within and shared between humans, with all our flaws.

Holsinger’s most recent novel is “Culpability,” an Oprah’s Book Club pick for summer 2025.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: The Voice of Hind Rijab

Published

16 hours ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

By Mylea Hardy Haunting, poignant, moving, The Voice of Hind Rijab tells the true story of a young Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car with six of her slain family members under enemy fire in Gaza as Red Crescent Aid workers desperately try to save her, despite overwhelming odds. A combination of real audio recordings from the actual incident and actor portrayals, the film does more than tell the story of an innocent girl caught in the crossfire […]