The Aerosmith Song You Turn All the Way Up

There is no neutral way to rank Aerosmith, because the catalog keeps changing what kind of band it belongs to. Dream On came out in 1973 from a group sharing one apartment in Boston, stopped at 59, and only reached the top ten when Columbia put it out again three years later. By 2004 the same five men were cutting a covers album of Delta blues. This ballot holds every A-side released under the band's own name, so a good half of the matchups set one era against another rather than one song against another.

Most of the shouting happens inside about eighteen months in the mid-seventies. Sweet Emotion, Walk This Way, Last Child and Back in the Saddle all arrived between Toys in the Attic and Rocks, and the talk box, the cowbell and Joe Perry's riffs off those two records got borrowed for the next twenty years. A song from any other period has to walk in and beat that.

A fair amount of it can. Run-DMC rebuilt Walk This Way in 1986 and handed the band a second career, then Permanent Vacation and Pump brought in outside co-writers and MTV and produced Janie's Got a Gun, whose video David Fincher shot and which is still the darkest thing they ever put on the radio. And I Don't Want to Miss a Thing, written by Diane Warren for a disaster movie, is the only Aerosmith single that ever topped the American chart.

Every entry is playable. Where an official video exists that is what you get; otherwise it is the studio master as the label posted it, so nothing here is a live take, a rehearsal or a remix.