"Angel" & "The Movie"

Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Roll your eyes now, if you must, but that's the way things were in the 1980s. If you were a mainstream rock band, you had your hard-partying rock anthems and your monster ballads. It was the only way that the thoroughly heteronormative (now there's a word I never thought I'd get to use) audience for hard rock could really communicate with the ideas of love, loss, pain and beauty. They had to be big, melodramatic, widescreen statements. Doubt me if you must, but it was a proven formula. Steven Tyler's account of things in his book is that anytime some tough, burly biker dude comes up to him in public and wants to talk about his favourite Aerosmith song, he knows the one they're going to want to talk about is "Angel."

It always reminds me of that scene in The Wrestler when Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei have a(n admittedly problematic) discussion of the time before Kurt Cobain, Nirvana and grunge made it not okay to just have a good time. In those days, this is how that audience conveyed sensitivity, and as an example of that, it's pretty effective. It hits all the right notes: the grandiose musical arch, the somber, eloquentyet simple (and decidedly vague) lyrics, that unmistakable statement of need: "Baby, you're my angel." It's cheap and sappy, (and the music video is ungodly cheesy) and even this band would do better in future years, but it is what it is, a starting point.

Lest we forget, Aerosmith was the pioneer of this kind of song, it's just that only by 1987 were they becoming a key part of the formula for rock success. It behooved them to provide a good example.



The album ends on a high note with a really cool instrumental called "The Movie," which seals the album up on an oddly ambiguous, yet thoroughly Aerosmithy note. It's always been the place of this band to sort of skew the viewer's headspace at least a little bit, to push the boundaries of what a down and dirty rock band is usually meant to do, without getting too alienatingly experimental. The best tunes are often ones that are just understood by instinct, that don't need to explain themselves.