It's tough to imagine in this post-I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing world we live in, but Aerosmith used to really kick ass. They gifted us some of the defining rock songs of the 70s: "Dream On," "Sweet Emotion," and f--cking "Mama Kin!" Then they went away for a while. Then they came back to legitimize and entire genre of music for white America by collaborating with Run-DMC on a remake of "Walk This Way" in the 80s. Also..."Love in an Elevator" and "Janie's Got a Gun." So that decade ended up being pretty great for Aerosmith. But then the 90s rolled around and something terrible happened. All of a sudden, Aerosmith wasn't a hard rock band anymore. Hell, they were barely a rock band at all. 1989's Pump may have been a warning shot about the band's impending turn toward the softer side of rock, but it was 1993's Get a Grip that established Aerosmith as a band that had somehow gone straight and gone insane at the same time, deciding to release the same song with different lyrics over and over again. ("Cryin" is "Amazing" is "Deuces Are Wild" is "Crazy.") But the final nail in the coffin was the smelly meteor that crashed into mainstream radio stations in 1998 thanks to a Ben Affleck movie about drilling for oil in space. "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" is as sure a sign of selling out as throwing your hands up in the air and proclaiming "Don't worry, we won't hurt you, we're just here for your money."
