What is Aerosmith's personality and does it even matter?

One of my goals in hosting You, Me and An Album is to give every featured album a fair listen, regardless of what preconceptions I may have about the artist or the record. This is more difficult with some albums than others. One of the more challenging episodes for me was when Rain Perry came on the show to discuss Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. As I discussed with Rain — and in a recent newsletter — I had a hard time overcoming the things that Springsteen represented to me. In becoming acquainted with Nebraska and thinking about my attitudes about Springsteen in general, I came to realize it didn’t have much, if anything, to do with him or his music. To paraphrase George Costanza, it wasn’t Bruce, it was me.

On the latest YMAAA with Adam Aizer, I ran into a similar roadblock with Aerosmith, as we chatted about their 1993 album, Get a Grip. This was particularly frustrating, because I couldn’t fully articulate what my issues with Aerosmith were. One reason that I cited for what I could generously call my ambivalence towards the band was that I couldn’t identify their personality. If that sounds vague, it’s because I never took the time to unpack what I meant by that. I just had a vague sense that I had a hard time placing Aerosmith in a narrative that helped me relate to them as people.

After my conversation with Adam, I started to think about where my sense of Aerosmith not being relatable came from and why it would matter to me. I remembered that my first exposure to Aerosmith was hearing “Dream On” on a Top 40 AM radio station in Philadelphia. I’m guessing that this must have been after the single was re-released in late 1975, because I am sure I never heard it upon its original release in 1973, when I still lived in the Chicago suburbs.