The music is the aural equivalent of a malfunctioning spin drier. The perpetually pubescent lyrics about big balls and lick sticks do a disservice to the word innuendo. The original lead singer, Bon Scott, was a high school drop out too “socially maladjusted” for even the Australian army. So why honour AC/DC? Why not venerate Beavis and Butt-Head while we’re at it?

Hardly a week passes without another reminder the ostensibly antipodean hard rock band are, in fact, as Scottish as a leftover haggis supper. We are told this connection makes them worthy of our collective esteem. Scott was born in Kirriemuir, Angus, where his father ran the local bakery and played in the pipe band until the family emigrated when he was six. The brothers Malcolm and Angus Young likewise left Glasgow for Sydney with their family aged ten and eight. Maybe they never quite got over it, as Angus likes to regress to that time when he hits the stage — aged 53 now — in his, ahem, hilarious schoolboy outfit.

This June they play Hampden Park, one of only two UK stadium gigs in the world tour promoting their new album, Black Ice. Those Glaswegians who prefer to ignore this particular 2009 Homecoming are unlikely to be left in peace — unless they head for Melbourne. AC/DC hold the decibel record for the loudest ever live concert.

All the same, Christine Grahame, the MSP for the South of Scotland, is determined the band are not ignored. She recently lodged a motion entitled “AC/DC we salute you”, to acknowledge their popularity and Caledonian roots. In a subsequent BBC interview she said it was only a tiny step towards the official recognition the band deserved. She wants the nation to follow the example of Angus council which celebrates its famous son, and the devotees who traipse to Kirriemuir each year to pay homage and keep Scott’s legacy alive. “It is clear Scott had a strong sense of his identity, from the ‘Scotland forever’ tattoo he had on his arm to his playing the bagpipes on the AC/DC track, It’s a Long Way to the Top,” said Grahame.

The MSP is a vocal campaigning politician who likes to play fast and loose with the press release. Sometimes she is spot-on — she was the first to campaign against army recruitment in schools, an issue that has been taken up by teachers throughout the UK. But in this instance her logic is as distorted as an AC/DC power chord.

Robert Burns has already been castigated as a poor role model for young Scots on account of his sexual promiscuity and love of a dram. He also left us poetry of incredible lyrical power, whether he was philosophising on the lot of the common man, satirising authority or expressing tenderness towards his many lovers.

Beside Bon Scott, Burns could occupy the editor’s chair at the Feminist Review. The closest AC/DC get to tenderness is Whole Lotta Rosie, in praise of the carnal expertise of a 19 stone woman known to the singer. If that’s too sentimental for your taste, what about Night Prowler, on which Scott plays the role of a sexual predator, taunting a woman lying alone in her bed, scared to turn the light off because of the noise outside her window. In the title song of the 1976 album, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, the singer offers to use neckties, TNT or concrete to dispense with the annoying people in your life — like school teachers and unfaithful partners.

It kind of makes you look again at the middle-aged, middle-class white men who regard this music as the ultimate in authenticity. Perhaps they love it because unlike them, the band never grew up. Angus Young says, with no little pride, that they stopped maturing musically at 17.

Scott clung to this suspended adolescence in real life too. When asked if he was AC or DC, he’d say neither — he was the lightening bolt in the middle. His flash of power and fame was brief. In 1980 he passed out in a friend’s car after a night of drinking and was found the next day, dead from alcoholic poisoning. It was later revealed that he was already being treated for liver damage. He was 33. Of course, we wouldn’t want to emulate the American Bible Belt matrons who burnt Highway to Hell in the street back in 1979. Many musicians have their lives cut short from excess and the lyrical content of AC/DC’s material is relatively tame today. Most who attend their concerts do so out of a sense of innocent escapism. A great many will have their tongues firmly in their cheeks, provided that isn’t too dangerous while banging one’s head pointlessly. And you cannot deny their extraordinary longevity. AC/DC have sold 200m albums worldwide — only The Beatles shift more of their back catalogue. Gaming culture has established the rock guitarist as hero among a whole new generation of kids — so expect to see quite a few pasty teenage faces among the bald heads in Hampden this summer.

But might isn’t always right, even when it’s a monster of rock. It doesn’t automatically qualify you for national esteem or parliamentary time. Tracing your lineage to the lands north of Carlisle isn’t enough either. That knee-jerk patriotism triggers memories of Stuart Rankin, the comic creation of Mike Myers, whose catch phrase was: “If it’s not Scottish it’s craaap!” One is also reminded of Jack McConnell’s cringe-inducing slogan that we were the best wee country in the world. Who says?

Honour the achievements of our sons and daughters by all means.

But only when they have done something worth celebrating. Sonic assault by wild men in mullets just doesn’t count.

joan.mcalpine@sunday-times.co.uk