O, Yeah! Ultimate Aerosmith Hits (2002)
Disc One
1.Mama Kin
2.Dream On
3.Same Old Song and Dance
4.Seasons of Wither
5.Walk This Way
6.Big Ten Inch Record
7.Sweet Emotion
8.Last Child
9.Back in the Saddle
10.Draw the Line
11.Dude (Looks Like a Lady)
12.Angel
13.Rag Doll
14.Janie's Got a Gun
15.Love in an Elevator
16.What it Takes
Disc Two
1.The Other Side
2.Livin' on the Edge
3.Cryin'
4.Amazing
5.Deuces are Wild
6.Crazy
7.Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)
8.Pink
9.I Don't Want To Miss a Thing
10.Jaded
11.Just Push Play
12.Walk This Way
13.Girls of Summer
14.Lay it Down
At some indeterminate point in their long and leather-laced career, Aerosmith became not only the definitive American hard rock band but also inadvertent champions of the compilation album. O, Yeah! Ultimate Aerosmith Hits is, paradoxically, neither the first nor final word on their legacy, but it may be the most democratic. Unlike earlier “best of” releases that were handicapped by label boundaries—Geffen-era albums stranded from Columbia-era classics—this double-disc affair finally unites both hemispheres of the band’s chronology. The result is less anthology than museum tour.
The set opens with the molten, almost chaotic charm of Mama Kin, which, though not a charting single, has aged into a mission statement of sorts. Dream On follows—now so familiar as to be misremembered, yet still arresting in its soaring fatalism. The likes of Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way are dispatched early, as though to clear space for the uneven Geffen-years, where gloss sometimes triumphed over grit.
The selection isn’t without its quizzical omissions. One wonders why Kings and Queens, a track whose baroque darkness foreshadowed metal’s more theatrical turns, is jettisoned in favor of the sexually juvenile novelty Big Ten Inch Record. The decision reveals either a tin ear or a winking sense of humor—perhaps both.
The controversial inclusion of Walk This Way (Run DMC version) provides a convenient capsule of the band's cultural pivot point: it’s not just that they “played” on a hip-hop crossover, it’s that they broke MTV with it. The track’s reappearance in original form is welcome, restoring the band’s ownership of its slinky menace.
Two new tracks round out the collection—Girls of Summer and Lay it Down. Though no match for their classic canon, they’re competent additions, betraying a certain journeyman charm that defines latter-day Aerosmith: polished, safe, but unmistakably theirs.
This compilation is no Rosetta Stone, nor is it exhaustive. But if the casual listener must own only one Aerosmith CD (a scenario likely engineered by Sony's marketing division), O, Yeah! is the sensible candidate. It’s an anthology that does what anthologies are meant to do—make the case for the band, warts and all. In Aerosmith’s case, the warts are half the fun.