The 1990s File Feature
What It Takes
What It Takes: Aerosmith's Power Ballad and Its Top Ten Hot 100 Breakthrough in 1990 Aerosmith had undergone one of the most dramatic commercial and artistic…
01 The Story
What It Takes: Aerosmith's Power Ballad and Its Top Ten Hot 100 Breakthrough in 1990
Aerosmith had undergone one of the most dramatic commercial and artistic rehabilitations in rock music history by the time "What It Takes" was released in 1990. The Boston band, formed in 1970 with vocalist Steven Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry as its creative core, had experienced a catastrophic mid-career collapse driven by the substance abuse problems that affected multiple members of the lineup, resulting in the departures of Perry and rhythm guitarist Brad Whitford in the early 1980s. By 1984, however, the classic lineup had reconvened, and the band embarked on the long recovery that would ultimately result in one of popular music's most improbable second acts.
The turning point came with the 1987 album Permanent Vacation, which was produced by Bruce Fairbairn with songwriting contributions from outside writers including Desmond Child and Jim Vallance. The decision to bring in professional songwriting collaborators was controversial among some observers but commercially decisive, producing a series of singles that reached the top twenty of the Billboard Hot 100 and restored the band's commercial standing. The follow-up album, Pump, released in September 1989 and again produced by Bruce Fairbairn, continued and accelerated this commercial trajectory.
Pump was recorded at Little Mountain Sound in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Fairbairn at the helm and a team of co-writers that again included Desmond Child. The album generated five singles, an extraordinary yield that reflected both the quality of the material and the effectiveness of Geffen Records' promotional campaign. The first two singles, "Love in an Elevator" and "Janie's Got a Gun," established the album's commercial momentum and earned significant MTV airplay, with the latter winning a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
"What It Takes" was the fourth single from Pump and was co-written by Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and Desmond Child. The song represented a significant departure from the harder rock material that surrounded it on the album, leaning into power ballad territory with a piano-driven arrangement, restrained drumming, and a vocal performance from Tyler that emphasized emotional vulnerability over the bravado of his rock performances. The production maintained Fairbairn's signature clarity and punch while giving the track the sonic warmth appropriate to its more intimate emotional content.
The single was released to radio in early 1990 and debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 17, 1990, entering at position 60. The chart climb was rapid and steady, moving to 45 on March 24, then to 34, then to 21, then to 17, reflecting the broad cross-format radio support the track received. The combination of pop radio and album-oriented rock airplay gave the single an unusually wide appeal base for a hard rock act. "What It Takes" reached its peak position of number 9 on the chart dated May 5, 1990, making it the band's first top-ten Hot 100 entry in nearly a decade and one of the commercial highlights of the entire Pump album cycle. The single spent 17 weeks on the Hot 100.
The music video for "What It Takes" received heavy rotation on MTV, where Aerosmith had become one of the most reliable content providers for the network's programming needs. The performance-oriented clip placed Tyler's vocal delivery at the center, supported by the band's polished professionalism in a format that rewarded visual presence as heavily as musical content.
Pump eventually sold more than seven million copies in the United States alone and was certified seven-times platinum by the RIAA. The album's commercial success confirmed that Aerosmith's second act was not a temporary aberration but a sustained commercial and artistic renaissance. "What It Takes" was a central piece of that story, demonstrating that a band capable of hard rock aggression could also deliver emotionally resonant ballads that competed effectively across the full spectrum of mainstream radio programming.
02 Song Meaning
The Cost of Commitment: Loss and Self-Examination in Aerosmith's "What It Takes"
"What It Takes" by Aerosmith positions itself as a post-relationship examination, a song delivered from the perspective of someone who has just witnessed the end of a romantic partnership and is attempting to understand what has happened and what might have been done differently. The central question encoded in the title, "what it takes," is deliberately ambiguous: it refers simultaneously to what it takes to sustain a relationship, what it takes to leave one, and what it takes to survive the aftermath of loss. This ambiguity gives the song a reflective quality that distinguishes it from more straightforwardly resentful or sentimental breakup songs.
The lyrical perspective is notably self-questioning rather than accusatory. The narrator does not position himself as a victim of another person's failures; he interrogates his own role in what went wrong and acknowledges uncertainty about whether his own behavior was adequate to the demands of the relationship. This self-examination was a somewhat unusual posture for a hard rock power ballad in 1990, a period when the genre's emotional conventions tended toward either idealized romantic declaration or straightforward heartbreak without the complication of genuine self-reflection.
Steven Tyler's vocal delivery is central to the emotional effectiveness of the song. His performance on the track is restrained by his own theatrical standards, emphasizing the rawness and honesty that the lyrical content requires rather than the spectacular vocal pyrotechnics that defined his more explosive rock performances. The piano-centered arrangement creates space for the voice to carry the emotional weight without the cushion of distorted guitars and bombastic drumming, forcing the listener's attention toward the lyrical content and the vulnerability in the delivery.
The song also participates in a broader narrative about Aerosmith's own biography that was highly legible to audiences in 1990. The band's well-documented history of substance abuse, personal conflict, and professional dissolution, followed by recovery and reunion, gave the themes of loss and the question of what it takes to sustain something valuable an autobiographical resonance that added depth to what might otherwise be a conventional heartbreak narrative. Audiences aware of the band's real history could hear in the song's exploration of relationship failure an echo of the band's own near-dissolution, which had cost them years of creative and commercial productivity.
The co-writing contribution of Desmond Child, who brought to the project his exceptional instinct for commercial hook construction and lyrical emotional directness, helped give the song the structural clarity it needed to communicate its reflective content to a broad radio audience. Child's ability to find the universal in the specific, to identify the emotional experience that the song needed to articulate and then locate the words and melodic hooks that would make that experience legible to the widest possible audience, was a significant factor in the track's commercial success and emotional impact.
The song's position within the Pump album's track sequence, following harder and more aggressive material, amplifies its emotional impact by contrast. The shift in dynamic register from the surrounding tracks creates a moment of genuine exposure within an album that otherwise projects confident, driven rock energy. This placement is itself a structural argument about the song's content: the moment of self-questioning arrives as a deliberate pause within a larger narrative of forward momentum, suggesting that genuine self-reflection requires stepping out of the usual flow of energy and activity to examine what has been left behind. "What It Takes" performs that examination with craft and emotional honesty.
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