Get a Grip (1992)
1.Intro
2.Eat the Rich
3.Get a Grip
4.Fever
5.Livin' on the Edge
6.Flesh
7.Walk On Down
8.Shut Up and Dance
9.Cryin'
10.Gotta Love It
11.Crazy
12.Line Up
13.Amazing
14.Boogie Man
At first glance, Get a Grip appears as the logical follow-up to Pump — confident, commercial, and gunning for global domination. But closer inspection reveals a record slightly sagging under the weight of its own expectations. Where Pump felt like a band roaring back with something to prove, Get a Grip occasionally sounds like a band trying just a touch too hard to prove it again.
Much had changed behind the scenes. A freshly inked multi-million dollar deal with a new label couldn’t have eased creative tensions, especially with Aerosmith still contractually bound to Geffen. The result? An album that sometimes mirrors its predecessor with uncanny precision — but without quite the same impact. Eat the Rich barrels in as a pseudo-Young Lust sequel, and Flesh oozes the same haunted sleaze as Janie’s Got a Gun, albeit without quite reaching the same unsettling brilliance. And yes, Tyler closes out the set with another brooding ballad — Amazing — filled with salvation talk and enough melodrama to rival a confessional booth.
Yet for all its borrowed poses, Get a Grip isn’t a bad album — far from it. There’s plenty of good old-fashioned Aerosmith swagger here. The problem is less about content and more about intent. Too often the album seems built from the outside in — as if chart placement was as important as guitar placement.
Take Fever — a gritty rocker that should have burned hotter, yet somehow found itself outshone by Garth Brooks’s unexpected country cover. The album’s holy trinity of ballads — Cryin’, Crazy, and Amazing — are lush and tuneful, but in their melodic closeness, begin to blur like three takes on the same idea. They were made for MTV, and the network responded in kind, but the repetition makes for a slightly weary listen today.
Attempts to diversify come sporadically. Shut Up and Dance tries but lacks bite. Walk on Down, a Joe Perry vocal spotlight, leans heavily on grit but ends up more filler than killer. Ironically, despite being Aerosmith’s most commercially successful album of the era, Get a Grip now feels like the tipping point — the moment when the band's MTV-era excess began to calcify into formula.
Yes, Get a Grip sold, and yes, we all heard it — again and again. But as the closing notes fade, one can’t help but wonder whether Aerosmith, in chasing hits, forgot a little of what made them hit in the first place.