The Aerosmith song Steven Tyler thought resurrected the band: “It rebirthed a whole new us”
Every artist usually has to come to grips with the idea of “selling out” occasionally. Compared to artists who just paint themselves into a corner with a specific style and don’t deviate in the slightest, there’s always that temptation that tells them to go along with what’s popular or try their hand at another style they haven’t done before. Aerosmith already had a few times where their pop-adjacent songs came to bite them in the ass, but Steven Tyler thought that one of their crowning achievements came when they took a chance on the Run-DMC remix of ‘Walk This Way’.
Then again, Aerosmith was not exactly in the best spot when they entered the 1980s. Sure, their sound had been an unofficial archetype for the Poisons and Van Halens strutting their stuff on MTV, but their reunion album Done With Mirrors felt like they were treading water creatively, especially with songs that still felt half-baked.
If they wanted to get in the good graces of the public, they needed something bigger than just a lead single. The band didn’t know what to do, but Rick Rubin certainly did, having been working with injecting rock beats into early rap records. While Beastie Boys were always the more straight-ahead rock-adjacent rap outfit, Run-DMC was more than a little bit reluctant about taking on the project.
Granted, you would probably be, too, if you were talking about resurrecting a fading rock band from the ground up. The riff was unstoppable, but when Darryl McDaniels looked at the lyrics, he didn’t want to be seen anywhere near what Tyler came up with.
When talking about putting the record over, McDaniels was terrified at the idea of singing it at first, telling Biography, “[Rick] said, ‘Y’all should make the record’. We had never heard the lyrics, so we put the record on the turntable. Then we got on the phone, saying, ‘This is hillbilly gibberish. We are not doing this. We will never do this.’”
Once Rubin sweet-talked the group into remixing the record, it was a match made in heaven. Tyler was a drummer before he turned himself into a singer, so the way he enunciates the lyrics isn’t too far off from what the early days of hip-hop would become. The video was also groundbreaking for its time, showing the group breaking down the walls of a studio to jam with the hip-hop icons.
The song may have been over a decade old at that point, but Tyler still credited Run-DMC for taking them to the next level of fame, telling Behind the Music, “They definitely lit a fire under the ass of rap, and music, and Aerosmith, for that matter. It rebirthed a whole new us.” At the same time, Aerosmith wasn’t about to become a hip-hop-adjacent band all of a sudden.
Once they released their record Permanent Vacation, fans got their first look at Aerosmith Mk. II, complete with outsider songwriters and massive hooks to compete with the Bon Jovis of the world. However, this also led to them putting out tracks like ‘Girls of Summer’ years later, so that career resurrection may have been a bit of a double-edged sword looking back on it.