Posts by Day: Sunday, April 13, 2008
Posted 4/13/2008 @ 6:47:00 PM by aerosmithrock.com
Livin' On the Edge, one of Aerosmith's hit singles from their 1993 album Get a Grip, is commonly seen to be a song about concerns about the politics and cultural climate of the modern world. That's absolutely ridiculous. Rock musicians don't have the time that it takes to become particularly well versed on these issues. Tyler himself isn't exactly the most cerebral of hair rockers. Perhaps Tyler, Joe Perry and Mark Hudson thought that it was when they wrote the song, but it most emphatically has more to do with their own lives as musicians than anything else. The common interpretation is simply deflated by the music video itself. Aerosmith as a band - and in its music video production in particular - has always been fascinated by easy teenage girls in plaid skirts that offer themselves up to the rock gods like sacrificial lambs prostrated on the altar of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. The lines "The lightbulbs gettin' dimmed / There's meltdown in the sky" clearly refer to their own neurotic fear of dropping out of the limelight, of becoming has-been rockers, the most disgusting and pathetic of all creatures that inhabit the rhinestone dungeons of the music industry. They go on: "Or we could let it go / But I would rather be hanging on." The "edge" itself is common 1960s and 70s lingo to refer to the joy that comes from a controlled process of self-destruction. Hunter Thompson, the gonzo lord of auto-annihilatory art, said it best: "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." Aerosmith is far more intimately involved in the blind, probing lurch towards the edge than they are in the problems of racism and global poverty. |
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