10 Hard Rock Albums Artists Want You To Forget About
4. Just Push Play - Aerosmith
After the early '80s left them all but dead in the eyes of the public, Aerosmith had seemed to have done the impossible in the back half of the decade. In one of the biggest second winds in rock history, the Bad Boys from Boston managed to get clean and put out amazing records in the era of glam metal, with records like Pump fitting nicely among the Motley Crues of the world. Once they reached the millennium though, something strange started to happen.
Drunk off of their success with the soundtrack fodder I Don't Want to Miss a Thing, Just Push Play is the sound of the Boys From Boston losing every single ounce of their grit. Instead of the usual guitar thunder you would get from Joe Perry, almost all of this album has a pristine sonic polish to every one of its tracks, making it feel more like a product of the '00s pop scene than a proper rock album.
Looking back on it, the whole thing feels more like a prop for Steven Tyler to use instead of a return to roots record. It's not like there was industry pressure for this either, with most of the record being produced by Aerosmith themselves. For as classic as something like Dream On still sounds after all these years, it's strange to think that it has to compete with something like Jaded in the setlist.