Eat the rich…

There’s only one thing that they’re good for.,.

Eat the rich… Take one bite now, come back for more.

I mean, if this isn’t the song of 2025, I really don’t know what is…

Now their smokin' up the junk bonds
And then they go get stiff
And they're dancin' in the yacht club
With Muff and Uncle Biff
But there's one good thing that happens
When you toss your pearls to swine
Their attitudes may taste like shit
But go real good with wine

I just heard Eat the Rich on the radio the other day and turned the volume ALL THE WAY UP (we’ll say nothing of the driving that accompanied it! I mean, this song is meant for the highway, right?).

Later on the same album, another harbinger of things to come. (Is Steven Tyler secretly psychic?)

If Aerosmith had written Livin’ On The Edge today, they might have gone a little harder on the social commentary, methinks. And while music critics criticized the song for a lack of heft, audiences wholeheartedly disagreed. In fact, this album, Get A Grip, is Aerosmith’s best selling album and the first one to reach #1 in the US.

To say that I played the shit out of this CD in 1993 would be a vast understatement.

Lo these 32 years later, what can I say about my affection for Aerosmith? Obviously, the majority of their songs were not quite as Socially Conscious. We lived in different times. I was a *secret* Hair Band Fan. Poison, Scorpions, Van Halen, Motley Crue, Def Leppard. (I came to Kiss and Metallica later.) It felt too dangerous, too sexual - things that I would never have embraced in my Goody Two Shoes days. Casual objectification, sexual awakenings, and big, sexy hair were all the rage in the eighties. Aerosmith was not subtle about any of these things… and we loved it! Tell me you don’t enjoy Ragdoll or Love In An Elevator or Walk This Way (original flavor). Go ahead… I’ll wait. What? What’s that? Yes, that’s right, bangers all of them.

(Obviously, this version is awesome, but it’s not quite the same message as the original.)

So, is it okay that in my 2025 sensibilities I still love Aerosmith’s music?

ARGH! Why do I ask myself the hard questions?

By all accounts (and his own), Steven Tyler did some pretty despicable things during the band’s heyday. I have said before that whenever I hear Michael Jackson on the radio, I change the channel because I truly believe he was a predator, enabled by sycophants. I have written before about the relationship between art and artist and boy howdy is knowing things a pain in the moral comp-ass!! This accountability bullshit is for the birds!

I have never believed in guilty pleasures, but perhaps I have stumbled upon where mine truly lie. There’s an entire dissertation (or ten) to be written about the relationship between art and artist, and whether we can or better still should separate the two.

We are (always and yet again) in the midst of a great societal tug of war: our better angels are calling out inequities and injustices and demanding that we acknowledge how financial privilege and, by and large, whiteness allows some people to be enabled and others to be victimized, while our desire for comfort and insulation encourage us to resist knowing things that we’ll feel compelled to address in some way. Don’t ask, don’t tell was an unspoken rule for a reason.

So, where does that leave me and the formerly sex on legs now everyone’s favorite bohemian grandma Steven? (Although, Joe Perry was arguable always the hotter band member - just to throw a little objectification in there for me to muddy the waters.) Can I still love Aerosmith? What do you think?

Take one bite now, spit out the rest,

Kris