Awesomely Awful Albums Part V!
Despite popular lore, I think Aerosmith was in fact the band who signed a deal with the Devil and not Led Zeppelin. There isn’t any other 70s hard rock relic that somehow manages to dupe most of the public into seeming relevant with each passing decade and every new album. Yet Tyler, Perry & Co. do each and every time, How!?? The Devil’s trickery I say! Get A Grip came out at that point in your life when you were just getting past Motley Crüe, G’nR, etc, etc and full on into Nirvana, Mudhoney & Soundgarden. It was beyond cheesy but that lingering hair metal in you couldn’t resist! And then of course there were the videos… Dude the videos! I think more than anything it was the videos and not the songs that made this such an awesomely awful nicely aged chunk of Gouda.
You had the teen libido power play of an Alicia Silverstone video trilogy (with a Liv Tyler cameo of course). Then there was Aerosmith’s keen eye to such 90’s hot button issues like virtual-reality! How could one not be suckered in? But the video and song I couldn’t get enough of was Livin’ On the Edge! That video is so over the top “lets make it resonate with 90s teens” retarded that it’s amazing! Eddie Furlong, doing his John Conner meets Jeremy impression, catholic school girl field hockey delinquents, a teacher in drag, air-bag joy rides, that weird green dude that pops out of a naked Steven Tyler and of course Joe Perry playing chicken with a locomotive. Now that’s a music video!
March 13th, 2008 at 2:00 am
MPTC, most of the albums that you have on your Awesomely Awful List (besides the Interpol record) came out when I was like 10 or 11, and I thought they were all really awesome. I’m waiting for you to make fun of Counting Crows ‘August and Everything After’ which I got for Easter when I was 11 and I still own.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:02 am
Counting Crows won’t make the list. The only awesome thing to me about them is allowing me the opportunity to harass Mike Jones at Karaoke.
March 13th, 2008 at 10:27 am
I gotta agree with the Crook, although I really hate hearing that song EVEN AT KARAOKE. Haha. “August and Everything After” won’t make this list because it’s an awfully awful album. I imagine that listening to that album is probably how someone feels once they wake up for the first time after getting a sex change and realizing they don’t have a dick anymore.
Stay tuned, I think I might drop some awesomely awful knowledge in the next few weeks…
March 13th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I also failed to mention how much the “GET A GRIP” type on the front of that album annoys me. I remember thinking even as a kid that I thought it looked like ass, but in the end it didn’t matter because there was a photoshopped cow tit with a piercing on the cover.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Yeah dude it looks like shit. Why is “GRIP” bigger? WHO ARE THE ALBUM COVER WIZARDS WHO CAME UP WITH THAT ONE??????????
March 13th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
well we were discussing that in teh office and if you look carefully there is a slight progression from “Get” to “A” where the “A” gets slightly larger… why “Grip” jumps less gradually is anybodies guess!
But this was way back in like 1993 when Illustrator and Photoshop were relatively new tools and I’m sure people were fucking around.
March 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Holy shit you’re right. also if you stare long enough at the udders the look like fingers.
ok turning computer off now