"Same Old Song and Dance (and Yeah, That’s Kinda the Point)" – An Open Letter from Steven Tyler
The fifth installment of AMERICA GONE WRONG, a monthly series of essays by Real Human American People (satire) documenting our great nation's decline, as generated with some help by ChatGPT
Hey there, babies.
It’s your ol’ scarf-slingin’, mic-stand-humpin’, leather-panted Uncle Steven here. That’s Steven Tyler, frontman of Aerosmith — you know us, yeah you do. The band who made your mama feel feelings she never admitted at a high school dance, and your dad air-guitar himself into a torn hamstring for “Love in an Elevator.”
I’m here with a confession, a reckoning, a rock n’ roll come-to-Jesus. And no, it ain’t about the time I wore a kimono on Letterman or shrieked my way into orbit on national TV. It’s about what happened to the band. To the soul of a group that once made “Sweet Emotion” crackle like a busted amp in a thunderstorm and turned “Dream On” into the gospel of every teenager staring out the window of a high school classroom, dreaming dreams bigger than their town.
Because here’s the thing: in the 1990s, we figured it out.
We cracked the code.
We found the formula.
We teamed up with hitmakers who didn’t just write music — they constructed anthems in laboratories filled with mixing boards and Top 40 blueprints.
Suddenly Aerosmith went from the dangerous, stoned-out legends of the strip-club jukebox to the official house band of every romantic comedy montage from here to eternity.
You know what I’m talkin’ about.
I’m talkin’ about:
🎤 “I don’t wanna close my eyes…”
🎤 “Pink! It’s the color of passion!”
🎤 “Falling in love is so hard on the knees!”
🎤 Ya-ya-ya-YOWWWWWW!
Yeah. That.
We leaned so far into my shriek that you could’ve parked a tour bus inside it. And baby, we sold. We sold a lot. And don’t think we didn’t hear the whispers — “sellouts,” they said. “Same song again,” they said. “You guys used to be dangerous,” they said.
And you know what?
They weren’t wrong.
Once upon a time we were dangerous.
And then we were efficient.
And maybe, yeah, we lost the plot somewhere between the power ballads and the Burger King ads. Maybe we traded a little grit for a whole lotta glitter. Maybe we took the edge off — not with cocaine this time, but with corporate synergy.
But look — wouldn’t every American do the same?
We started as scrappy kids outta Boston, swappin’ licks and dropping acid. We became legends. Then we became a brand. Then we became a safe bet. Hell, we were the soundtrack to your cousin’s wedding and your aunt’s menopause commercial. And if that ain’t the American Dream, I don’t know what is.
Because this ain’t just the story of Aerosmith, baby.
It’s the story of the U.S. of A.
You chase your wildest dreams until you catch ’em — then ride ’em until the wheels fall off and you end up in Vegas with a rhinestone jumpsuit and a retirement plan.
So yeah, maybe we made “Janie’s Got a Gun” sound like “Cryin’” sound like “Crazy” sound like “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” with a fresh coat of string section and a high-gloss yowwwwwwwww.
But those songs?
They still slap.
They still make the crowd sing.
They still pay for Joe Perry’s snakeskin boots and my dental plan.
So, from the bottom of my silk-shirted heart, I say:
I’m sorry…
...but I ain’t that sorry.
Because in the end, we’re just a bunch of wild boys who found the magic, then found the money, then licensed out our groove into a bridge as predictable as they come.
And if that ain’t the story of every American who’s ever sold out just a little to keep the dream alive, then what is?
Stay wild, stay weird — and don’t forget to scream a little.
— Steven Tyler
Ya-ya-ya-yowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
explanatory note:
A pierced udder, the bristly and branded black and white fur: some album art. Along with Pearl Jam’s Vs., Aerosmith’s Get a Grip was the first CD I ever owned — a gift one Christmas from my parents. I was in eighth grade. My parents lived in a sonic cocoon of songs from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, and so had I, up until that point. When Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, and Guns N’ Roses ran through my fifth grade classroom like brushfire, all I could do was break from the Piers Anthony novel I was holding to make fun. I knew where the truly great songs were, and no way, no how was it there. “Shot through the heart and you’re to blame/ Darling, you give love a bad name”: I performed an antic version of that melodrama by way of parody, but this was stupid stuff. At a basement slumber party with the boys, where after a round of darts our chosen competition became lip-synch pantomime, I killed with a falling-to-my-knees, chest-thumping rendition of “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” My friends of that era rolled across the rug, crying with laughter. I don’t think I’d ever even listened to the song all the way through until acting it out. Then, the ultimate adolescent compliment: the kid who went next chose the same song, and tried his own version of my satirical antics. But it just didn’t play the same way.
Those hair-band songs in and of themselves seemed to emit not from an authentic place, but some factory mentality. The speaker—the voice the lead singer dramatized—presented tongue-in-cheek as the hero of a movie, and the movie was a potboiler, with a car jumping in flames over the summit of a hill in slow motion, everybody’s mouths sprung open, dark sunglasses slipped just far enough down to show the driver’s wide-open eyes at the instant of maximum air.
Aerosmith, on the other hand, seemed to have come from a real place, one that existed before I was even born. Those songs had the slow-growing power of a spell from the same source as other rock songs I loved from the 1970s, some ascendant design at the brink of revelation. They weren’t an imitation of the thing: they were the Thing Itself.
“Sweet Emotion.” “Dream On.” And, sure, with “Walk This Way” something had started to change in the band from Boston, a degree of success and ubiquity that, in retrospect, torqued Aerosmith out of their own special corner and into the sheer spotlight. Tyler, performing that hit alongside Run-D.M.C. in an MTV music video, used his vocalizations as punctuation like the trained drummer he was. For the avid listener, it was if he were floating a few feet off the ground, the entire crowd hanging on exactly how and when he’d drop those words everybody knew so well. Maybe it was always inevitable? Aerosmith, the band, the brand, the tailored product, started to split away from Aerosmith, the genuine up-and-comers. Once formula won out over burning feeling as the impetus for what got made, the band risked becoming more slick veneer than pugnacious upstart. By the time the CD for Get a Grip found a way to my teenaged hands, that transformation was all but complete.
And yet I listened to that album a bunch, didn’t I? Felt a need to join the present tense of the perceived cultural moment—or put more simply, I thought it’d be easier to relate to my peers if I’d listened to the same music as they said was cool now. In fact, Pearl Jam was who friends of mine thought were cool; Aerosmith just happened to be all over the television screen, and if I was going to break away from what I’d previously known, they offered, to my mind, a getaway more established than whatever the hell Eddie Vedder was bellowing, with all that momentous-sounding calamity behind him. I listened to Tyler, Perry & co. half with a desire to make fun and half-believing their songs might help in explaining the mysterious exigencies of adolescent longing en route to adult knowledge. The songs themselves felt circular. The singles from the album all hit the same marks at almost exactly the same moments within each track. They were easy to make fun of, because easy to remember, and because easy to remember, they hung around in my head: it wasn’t clear, eventually, whether Aerosmith or my own consciousness is what I found so absurd. I did, as the songs suggested I might, long for the presence of wild pretty girls, even if that longing found as a subject no one who actually entered my bedroom at that time but simply the sleek black stereo itself.
As I got older, formulas imposed themselves everywhere, or at least I started thinking that way: the Eighties, as a decade, appeared to be the winking embrace of practiced pattern, the Nineties as those same patterns’ global fruition. To hang the transformation from raw authenticity to practiced formula all on Steven Tyler of Aerosmith is of course hugely unfair. Even if landmark hit, “Walk This Way,” is a step-by-step reenactment of how a teenager gets laid (no real aspiration to love) by following the right steps through a precarious rollicking present tense until such time as a pattern to his assignations is definitively established. The song’s mainly about pulling off the feat and performing the boast (all be the feat pulled off by minding how the woman tells the guy to act). “Professionalize” was on its way to becoming a workplace fetish word in wide usage; Apple computers replicated the capacity to sort by type; chain restaurants and stores reproduced across the highway-lined landscape with the promise of an outward appearance already remembered: predictable aromas; clean, well-lighted; the Name You Know.
A writer, finally, sits before a screen; rather than drawing language out of his own thrumming chest he can now task an algorithm with filling in “the content” using a digital conveyor belt for narrative simulacra. The act of sitting, and wrestling with, and worrying over the procession of language on the screen is almost always about striking the right balance between authenticity and comprehensibility. The sentence committed to the page—or sleek backlit screen, illuminated in a way a page cannot be—affects the feeling given by the one that follows. We have all of us become, have we not—how have we not?*—Steven Tylers negotiating an uneasy peace between received formulas and what there is within us striving to breathe unadulterated air.
Obviously there is no excuse for this. Except that it struck me, and some friends, as pretty funny. Any publication, especially in dark times, ought to balance the serious with the humorous, and as I am just one writer here at Beyond the Frame, I figured I could use the help of an occasional guest columnist, even one formulated as pure satire.
*with a nod of abiding appreciation to the late Jeff Baena and his script, with David O. Russell, for I Heart Huckabees (2004), whose themes and preoccupations match the substance of this afterword.
See
part 1 of America Gone Wrong
part 2
part 3
part 4
why would i ever read anything generated by chatgpt. if you can't be bothered to write it, why would anyone bother to read it. what an insult to real writers.
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