Van Halen - Hard Rock or Heavy Metal

What genre are they? Clearly, Eddie transformed metal guitar like no one before him or after him (except for maybe Rhoads and Malmsteen). Many metal bands today cite Van Halen as an influence, but you can say the same for many other early bands. I would say that from Van Halen to Fair Warning, they could be, for certain, called heavy metal. Diver Down and 1984 still had metal moments, but not like the previous four albums. What do you think?

I'd say they are hard rock, not metal.

Required Fields wrote:

I'd say they are hard rock, not metal.

I agree, however they were the beginning of Heavy Metal with bands like Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, and Eddie is in my opinion one of the most original, talented and influential guitarists in the world....

Definitely not metal. Unless Overrated is a metal genre.

Hard Rock w/Roth; Pop Rock w/Hagar.

They are more metal than most bands who carry that title.

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Definitely not metal. Unless Overrated is a metal genre.

yeah, inspiring alot of folks to pick up an instrument and play is really over-rated

you were what, barely out of diapers when they got thier break....I'd say you missed the boat on the actual impact they had on music. IF you'd a caught a show from 78' till 82, the opininion you posses would definitily be different. I know.....you've seen some cheesy You Tube clip and think that's the same thing.

By the way, what you said is funny. But you have no real life experience but a cd to back it up......sorry.

Let's try to keep the self-righteousness to a minimum.

Hard rock, but the guitar sound (especially the solos) is metal.

I'm going with the sentinel on this - hard rock w/roth, commercial rock w/hagar.

Eddie does rock

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Let's try to keep the self-righteousness to a minimum.

yeah sarcasm and arrogance are WAY better attributes


Here is a definition of "self righteous"...confident of one's own righteousness, esp. when smugly moralistic and intolerant of the opinions and behavior of others.

I can see how you might call my post "intolerant", perhaps? Still, you are entitled to your opinion. Yet it's kinda like talking about which car is better and you've never driven one. I wasn't trying to be smug. moralistic, or anything. Just giving my opinion, which seems to be less valid than yours by the comment you made.

Who the hell was being arrogant? I think Van Halen is overrated and I jokingly pointed that out. If you can't handle the way we joke on this forum, then you should simply leave or ignore those posts. You act as if I've never heard the band before. THAT is arrogant! And it's 100% incorrect! I don't discuss anything unless I know what I'm talking about. Whether Van Halen is overrated or not is an opinion, of course, but don't come in here waving the opinion flag around if you can't handle a different opinion on a band you may like (i.e. self-righteous).

I read an old Creem magazine article once, and it said "If you don't like Van Halen, your wrong!".

Anyway moving on, simplistic boring terms like hard rock and heavy metal don't do justice to Van Halen. They are were music force/genre unto themselves. As Stiv Bators said "All this and more".

Hard Rock def not Metal. Im not the biggest fan and i do prefer Roth over Sammy. Eye i look at them the same way as you simple song structures with the only real talent in Eddie's fingers..

Early days HEAVY ROCK, and later more MELODIC HARD ROCK with SAMMY HAGAR. Still they are part of the metal movement. If somebody likes to call them just metal its okay too (just my opinion of course).

I abhor this ridiculous debate.

Van Halen adorned the cover of just about every heavy metal magazine there was in the late 70's and early 80's. They were part of the American heavy metal craze. To deny they were a metal band at their inception is just to rewrite history.

Those of us who were there and grew up with bands like Van Halen, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, UFO, Judas Priest, Quiet Riot, Thin Lizzy, Ted Nugent, Kiss, etc. called it heavy metal. You'd have a better argument saying that the modern bands labeling themselves heavy metal are not, since these are the bands that defined the genre in the 1970's and early 80's.

Read any book on heavy metal history and read about how a young guy named Eddie Van Halen out of California changed the way people thought about heavy metal guitar playing. Do a quick Google search and type in "1970's heavy metal" and see if Van Halen's name isn't listed as one of the most influential bands of the decade, along with Led Zeppeling, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, etc..

I did a Google search and here was the first thing that came up:

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About.com

Heavy Metal Timeline
From Chad Bowar,
Your Guide to Heavy Metal.

Heavy metal is one of the newer genres of music. Most experts put its beginnings in the late '60s and early '70s. Since that beginning, metal has grown and evolved, spawning a multitude of genres and sub-genres. In the '80s some heavy metal became mainstream, but throughout the years it been mainly an underground phenomenon. Even though most people have heard of Def Leppard or Judas Priest, the huge majority of metal bands are unknown to the mainstream. Here's a heavy metal timeline:

Late 1960's - Early 1970's
The birth of heavy metal. Groups like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were the first heavy metal bands.

Late 1970's
The rise of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NHOBHM). Bands like Iron Maiden and Judas Priest become very popular.

1978
Van Halen released their debut album.

Eyesore wrote:

Definitely not metal. Unless Overrated is a metal genre.

I concur. After the S/T, their music got old really fast for me. And to my ears, every solo Eddie plays sounds exactly the same.

And Van Hagar? Fuhgeddaboutit!

By 1978's standards (when their debut album was released), Van Halen was pretty damn "metal." As Ult pointed out, at that time just about ANY BAND that had long hair and included guitar solos in their music (i.e. Ted Nugent, AC/DC, UFO, KISS, etc.) was considered "heavy metal." Hell, back then a lot of people considered ZZ Top and Journey "metal"!

If you're going to judge VH by the standards of today, then obviously they're not very metal. But in those bygone days, they were about as metal as you could get. Their early discography (from the self titled debut album thru 1981's FAIR WARNING) had a pretty profound effect on a lot of kids back then (who are now old farts like me).

But the less said about Van Hagar, the better... I'm with Toho on that era. Fugeddaboudit.

After reading all the responses and forming an opinion based on these comments, I have thought long and hard about this and have finally come to a conclusion:

Eyesore is a d*ck.

I had a kid email me once and say something like, "if Van Halen, Judas Priest and Aerosmith are heavy metal, who are the rock bands?" I thought about including it on my Hall of Shame page, but the kid was actually quite nice as I emailed him back and forth, so I decided no to include it.

My response back to him was to ask him if these bands were not heavy metal in the 1970's, who was? I also send him a mile long list of "rock bands" from the 1970's. Bands like Styx, The Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Supertramp, The Doors, Yes, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Donny Iris, ELO, Chicago, the Rolling Stones, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, Genesis, King Crimson, Keith Green, Billy Joel, Elton John, Jackson Brown, BTO, Bob Segar, Rod Stewart, Cream, The Yardbirds, Janis Joplin, Sly & the Family Stone, Three Dog Night, John Lennon, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Blondie, Grateful Dead, Grandfunk Railroad, Elvis Presley, The Kingsmen, The Cars, Peter Frampton, Todd Rundgren, Linda Ronstadt, Santana, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Cheap Trick, Joe Cocker, America, The Moody Blues, Buddy Miles, Bread, Little River Band, The Kinks, Hall & Oates, Humble Pie, Firefal, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Neil Young, Chuck Berry, The Tubes, Allman Brothers, Edgar Winter, Peter Gabriel, etc.

Obviously, if heavy metal started in the late 60's and 1970's, someone had to be heavy metal. Who were these metal bands if not Van Halen and the like? To say they were not is simply history revisionism.

Also BLUE ÖYSTER CULT, TED NUGENT, RUSH etc...were called heavy metal in those days. For me they are still a part of our metal movement because they are heavy rock/hard rock bands but for many people, today they are just classic rock, or ROCK bands.

I think Van Halen started off as metal, but when they changed up with Hagar it was more pop rock to me than anything. Well, even before that with 1984 and the addition of the synths I feel they moved away from metal a little too. But their S/T and Fair Warning are still among my favorites. Although, as for what that kid said Scott, I can see his point on Aerosmith and Van Halen, but why he would say that about Judas Priest is proposterous.

A lot of the magazines that called bands like VH, Aerosmith, Journey, etc., "metal" back then are the same ones that referred to Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc., as "metal" in the 90s. Someone could say in 2020 or so, "Korn IS a metal band! They were always referred to as "metal" by magazines I read 20 years ago. Anyone who says they aren't metal is just being a revisionist."

Again, I'm not attacking Van Halen or whatever, they just weren't really a metal band. They were influential towards metal and all, but apart from some solos, were more rooted in hard rock than anything.

I am definitely not trying to insist Korn is metal, either, by the way, as they aren't.

Required Fields wrote:

A lot of the magazines that called bands like VH, Aerosmith, Journey, etc., "metal" back then are the same ones that referred to Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc., as "metal" in the 90s. Someone could say in 2020 or so, "Korn IS a metal band! They were always referred to as "metal" by magazines I read 20 years ago. Anyone who says they aren't metal is just being a revisionist."

Again, I'm not attacking Van Halen or whatever, they just weren't really a metal band. They were influential towards metal and all, but apart from some solos, were more rooted in hard rock than anything.

I am definitely not trying to insist Korn is metal, either, by the way, as they aren't.

Magazines aren't the be all and end all, but they are one of many "proofs", if you must have one for something that is a historic fact.

If we are to believe your logic, please tell me who the American heavy metal bands were in the 1970's? If not Van Halen, then who? Are you seriously trying to say that all us fans who grew up in that era and time are wrong?

Personally, I hate the whole hard rock vs. heavy metal debate anyway because for a genre of music that has constantly evolved (and evolved as much) as metal has in 30 or so years, it makes the tags seem somewhat arbitrary.

However to say that songs like Atomic Punk, D.O.A, Loss Of Control and Unchained (and the respective albums they came from) aren't heavy metal or didn't influence those that came after seems a bit ridiculous to me.