No. 132 - Aerosmith’s “Livin’ on the Edge” changed my life

Michael Munnik should have hated this song, but instead he was transfixed

Mar 13, 2026

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 5 min read •

“Livin’ on the Edge” by Aerosmith marked an absolute paradigm shift in my musical taste. It set the path not only for what I listen to but how I express myself.

As a child in the ’80s, my tastes were pretty conventional. From my parents’ collection, I got the Beatles, the Beach Boys, John Denver, and crucially Paul Simon. From the radio, film soundtracks, and just the background culture of the time, I got plenty of ’80s pop — Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston. The essentials.

The music I started choosing as I grew older was rap — often the goofy stuff. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were the first artists I’d really consider “my music,” and they led me to compilations like Rap Traxx 2 and X-Tendamix Dance Mix ’92 — the first CD I ever owned, as the first in my family to even have a CD player. I got it on reward points during my years delivering newspapers for the Nanaimo Daily Free Press.

The one thing I definitely avoided was guitar music. My brother Dan is three years older than me, and we were about as different as you can be while parented by the same two people. I had glasses, was bookish and confident. Dan fancied himself a rebel and was easily persuadable. In the late ’80s, he determined that his music was heavy metal (we used the term very loosely) — Def Leppard, Poison, Kiss. Loud, low, and aiming to offend. He grew a rat tail just to piss off our mom.

Since I was clearly so different from him, his music was clearly not mine. Anything with guitars — especially distorted ones — was heavy metal and therefore Dan’s music and therefore nothing to bother with. Screaming vocals? No thank you.

(The one thing we agreed on was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. Yes, it had guitars, big hair, and metal stylings for the album cover. But Aunt Barb — ten years our mother’s junior — played it, and that made it enjoyable common ground.)

Michael (right) with his brother, Dan, a few years later

It was a strange experience, therefore, to listen to LG73 — one of Vancouver’s “all hits” radio stations — play the Top 8 at 8 and get transfixed by a song that by rights should repel me. Lightly overdriven guitars making a jangly lick over a persistent drone and an acoustic strum, with a big kick drum building the anticipation. The guitars get louder and crunchier in the chorus, Steven Tyler screams, there’s a wanky guitar solo, and it’s a sprawling, epic song. Yet I was hooked.

Partly, I think, the lyrical message pulled me in. I reused sandwich containers for school lunches, convinced the parents council to buy recycling bins for every classroom, campaigned to save the rainforest. I knew, as Tyler sang, that “Something’s wrong with the world today.” He wasn’t singing about cars, chicks, or Satan, but social disharmony and environmental degradation. His urgency as well as, finally, his optimism appealed to me.

There may also have been a through line to the rap music I loved. I would later learn that Aerosmith had one of the first rap-rock collaborations, with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way,” but my undiscriminating ear could hear hip-hop cadences in the bridge:

Tell me what you think about your situation
Complication, aggravation
Is getting to you
If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling
Even if it wasn’t, would you still come crawling
Back again?
I bet you would, my friend
Again, and again, and again, and again, and again

It was righteous and clear in its accusation. I loved it.

I turned 14 a month after Aerosmith released the album Get a Grip, and you bet your ass it was on my wish list. My parents got it for me — on cassette, so I could listen on my Walkman during my paper route. I don’t know how they felt about it: “Oh no, the sensible one wants this awful music, too.”

And it did prove my gateway. The riff on “Eat the Rich” just slammed, “Cryin’” was brilliant, and I could not pretend this wasn’t my brother’s kind of music. I was converted. For his part, Dan was pivoting to — guess what? — rap. Gangsta rap, of course, with a special fondness for Tupac Shakur that endures to this day. His first tattoo fixed “Thug Life” to his shoulder in heavy gothic script, just to piss off our mom.

And me? From Aerosmith, it was a quick remedial run through Seattle grunge. 1994 became the annus mirabilis of Canadian alt-rock, and that was also the year I bought a guitar and started making my own music, a habit that, like my brother’s tattoo, hasn’t gone away.

Aerosmith, like my brother’s rat tail, did get cut off, however. By grunge purity standards, they were far too cock-rocky and commercial. As if to prove the point, they would have a huge hit with the shitty ballad for that asteroid movie — a song that ’80s me would have loved. But Get a Grip and its lead single “Livin’ on the Edge” were my Bing Bong in that incredible scene from Inside Out: the essential motor to get me out of the deep hole of latent culture and inherited musical taste, up to the high plateau of my own burgeoning interests and passions. Like Bing Bong, it didn’t make the journey with me, but it got me where I needed to be. ◆

About Michael

Michael Munnik is a songwriter and scholar living in Cardiff, Wales. Before emigrating to the UK, he fulfilled a lifelong dream as a radio journalist for CBC in Ottawa, Canada.

Bluesky @michaelmunnik.bsky.social

Website michaelmunnik.ca

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