I think they are, yeah. At the very least they were heavy metal adjacent. I think they also had an enormous influence on the evolution of the genre, and their massive success essentially gave birth to hair metal, at least as a major commercial phenomena. I don't think the labels would have thrown so much money in that direction if "Jump" had never gone to #1 and 1984 hadn't sold by the tractor trailer load. I wasn't a huge fan of the genre, but even at that time I knew "Jump" and the rise of Van Halen was a very big deal.
My third VH album. I rushed out and bought it the day it was released. But, it's not my favorite VH album, though. Not even close.
Jump is one of those songs that sounds good when it starts then a minute into it you're just bored. The instrumental bridge is good too but it's really just way too loud. I have to take it in small doses. I don't think I could name another Van Halen song.
VH to me is hard rock; too party oriented for me t call them heavy metal, which I associate with a certain, grim, unsmiling darkness; but these classifications can get a bit imprecise. Anyway, this song was huge in my world, but it wasn't until years later that I appreciated it as a pop song. And I do now. I'm not a huge VH fan, but I like them now; both the Roth and Hagar incarnations; Roth had so much personality and is one of the great rock frontmen, even if his singing is extremely limited. To me the main start here is that synth riff...it's just really over the top but in a cool way, it sounds like someone who was really just enjoying himself. I'm not a huge VH fan, but I do like their singles when I hear them.
Me too. Along with AC/DC, Aerosmith and a few others, I consider them hard rock but not heavy metal. The difference can be blurry, but there definitely is one.
"Jump" I do remember liking it at the time but the shine wore off shortly after.VH to me was hard rock but this song made them pop rock.At least for the time being.
This was one of two songs I seem to remember which used the phrase "roll with the punches" in the lyrics. The other being The Isley Brothers' 1975 hit "Fight The Power."
When "Jump" hit, I was unfamiliar with Van Halen's music save for "Pretty Woman" and "Dancing In The Street". Rather than viewing it as a sellout or a radical shift in style, I embraced "Jump" as a fully realized pop/rock single that sounded like the next logical step from the two hits mentioned earlier.
They certainly were the first to reach the top in that genre, but hair metal had already been up and coming for a while. Certainly Quiet Riot, who had a huge hit just a little before this, would qualify. And Twisted Sister were already in the pipeline, although I think they hit it big shortly after this. Heck, there was a heavy metal day at the Us Festival in mid-1983, and it was the most attended of the three days.
Heavy Metal had been a popular genre for a while at this point but not reflected on the pop charts. I used to recreate logos of my favorite bands on poster board in the years leading up to this with the likes of Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Ratt, Motley Crue etc with Van Halen making the cut as well. It seems that the one-two punch of ‘Cum on Feel The Noize’ and ‘Jump’ gave program directors the leeway to start adding singles by heavier acts but if you look closely it was the ballads and poppier material that clearly won out. Just another quirk that made the 80’s what they were. Hearing Prince followed by Whitesnake or Poison didn’t raise any eyebrows nor should it have
Oh it was definitely on the rise, but "Jump" took it to a whole new level. Remember it didn't just get to #1, it stayed there for weeks. Metal had been part of an expansive and successful hard rock niche, but it hadn't been topping the pop charts like this before. This really announced its arrival in the mainstream. Don't forget "Owner Of A Lonely Heart", which certainly had nods to metal in that electric guitar work scattered throughout the song.
Meanwhile at home, a disaster! UPI ARCHIVES FEB. 29, 1984 A major blackout, apparently caused by a malfunction in a 500,000-volt power line in Northern California, struck seven Western states stretching from the Northwest to the Mexican border at dusk Wednesday. Although lights only flickered in many areas, and power was restored after a few minutes in others, some sections including parts of Los Angeles and other major cities remained without service more than two hours later. A Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokeswoman said the exact cause of the blackout would not be known for several days, but said it apparently involved an 'interruption or disturbance' on a power line near a substation at Round Mountain near Redding, Calif., 100 miles south of the Oregon border. The two largest cities in Arizona, Phoenix and Tucson, lost most of their power for nearly an hour. A major blackout, apparently caused by a malfunction in... The power dimmed, surged and went out at our place in west Phoenix that Wednesday evening, and when it came back on my brand new Sony receiver was dead. Disaster! Killed by a voltage surge, its computer brain was fried. Fortunately the cassette deck and turntable had somehow survived. I found an authorized Sony repair shop clear across town and took it over to be fixed. And waited. And waited. And waited. I waited clear into the summer before they finally called to tell me it had been repaired. We swung by the shop across town on the way back from surgery in Scottsdale - I had a basal cell carcinoma hacked off of my left cheek that June at the ripe old age of 15. Welcome to growing up in Arizona! Here's your skin cancer. Anyhow, when I got home in the 115 degree heat after riding for 40 minutes with no air conditioning and what looked like a falsie taped to my face, I plugged the receiver back in. Immediately I noticed they'd installed the display backwards(!!!). And it was no longer a stereo, it was a mono. And it came on at full volume and faded down, instead of coming on at zero volume and fading up. In other words, their "fix" had pretty much destroyed the unit. While all this was going on I looked out the window of my room to see flames shooting out of the grass at the edge of our front yard, getting perilously close to a palm tree covered in dead fronds and badly in need of a trim. At first I thought I was hallucinating - the local anesthetic they'd used for the surgery had seemed to make me a little woozy - but shaking my surprise I made a mad dash for the front door. Fortunately a good Samaritan passing by on our busy street had already spotted the fire, stopped, and was hopping over a low wall by our house to get to the garden hose. He doused the flames just seconds before the burning grass reached the palm tree. When it flames it pours. At this point I gave up on getting my receiver repaired and did what I should have done in the first place - called the store where we bought it (the late, lamented Diamonds) and asked if they could replace it, since it was still under warranty. Much to my surprise they immediately said yes, so we begged a ride out of an aunt of mine and drove downtown to trade in my busted receiver for a replacement, which worked perfectly. And I also bought my first voltage spike protector, because I didn't want to go thru that again, and I figured Diamonds had earned our cash.
On The Tonight Show, Elvis Costello referred to Van Halen as a “root beer version of The Who.” While I think he should have been more tactful, I agreed with the comment. I was 23 years old at the time and thought bands like a Van Halen were for 14 year old kids, and not to be taken seriously. Maybe that’s not fair, but I never warmed up to them even though Eddie Van Halen is a fabulous guitar wiz. “Jump” does nothing for me and I have a hard time thinking of a Van Halen song that I really like (maybe “Runnin’ with the Devil” - I kind of like that one). They sold a lot of records and have many devoted fans, but I’m not one of them.
David Lee Roth famously told the rock press that the reason rock critics liked Elvis Costello more than Van Halen is because they all looked like Elvis Costello. That probably didn't endear Roth to Elvis. (though there was also a painful element of truth to that statement!).
Jump Around the start of 1984, MTV was becoming increasingly more corporate and less adventurous. In its first few years, the channel was almost like the wild west; it seemed like any offbeat group could put a video up there and potentially get a big hit. But slowly, the big labels began to understand how to use MTV for their own promotions, and by mid-1983, the videos for their artists had become ever more expensive, with far higher production values. They began to push the upstarts off the channel. To me, the start of the MTV Sucks era came with the release of Michael Jackson's Thriller video. For weeks it was touted as the ultimate music video: Longer than any video before! Most expensive video ever! A real Hollywood director (John Landis, who had recently done American Werewolf in London)! That kind of ballyhoo was more in the tradition of Hollywood and not rock, which was if anything anti-hype, so for kids of my age, it really struck us as crass. When the video finally landed, it would be played regularly at the top of the hour, sucking away 15 minutes or so of time that could have been spent playing three or four normal videos. Along came Van Halen. Their snarky front man, David Lee Roth, bragged in the press that their next song featured the LEAST expensive video ever made: 'probably a couple hundreds bucks at most!' he bragged. OK, the video probably cost more than that, but the mere fact that he took the anti-stance to the hype was a bold move at the time, and totally rock n' roll. A direct thumb-in-the-eye to the labels. We kids loved it. That it became a bigger hit than Thriller, which peaked at 4, was icing on the cake. Go ahead and jump! I was never a big fan of Van Halen, but what was clear was that Roth really knew how to play the media game. They could do lunk-headed c@ck rock with the best of the hair metal guys, but Roth added a weird element of appreciation for oldies - even pre-rock music - and degenerate razzmatazz that lifted them above the rest of the crowd. The tension between his approach and his more rock-minded bandmates was their secret sauce. When he was forced out and more traditional front man Sammy Hagar was inserted, they continued to have a lot of financial success, but the magic was gone. I liked pretty much all the singles they produced at the time, and Roth milked his appeal expertly with MTV, even somehow convincing them to give him his own special on the network, DaveTV, which was of course a piss-take on the very network that was showing it. The Jump video has about it the joy of a group of doofuses reveling in the fact that a (by then) major network was devoting time to a video of a bunch of grown men jumping around. The song isn't exactly Blowin' in the Wind, but there aren't many tunes that remind me more of early 1984 than this one. The synths are a nice touch that add something to their usual sound without seeming like a sellout to the times. And Eddie contributes his typical pyrotechnics to remind us that this isn't your usual MTV romp. Best of all is the message, still true today. Not sure what to do in life? You might as well jump. Go ahead and jump! Just make sure you're not on a ledge when you do it.
Yeah, MTV started to go very corporate in '84, and as we'll see the charts suffer a bit as a result. The establishment was striking back, although plenty of upstarts still managed to make it onto MTV and on the radio. But it was becoming less consumer driven and more marketing driven.
I did appreciate Roth's attitude toward MTV, thanks for reminding me. These guys had been in the record business long enough to know what a cesspit it was, and they were big enough stars already that they could say or do whatever they wanted. "Jump" and 1984 just gave Roth even more ability to do whatever the hell he wanted. My impression was always that he could be an obnoxious jerk but not an evil one. MTV VJ Martha Quinn - probably my favorite of the bunch - related something Roth once told her during an interview when something technical was going wrong. "The secret is don't sweat the small stuff," Roth told her, and then lowered his voice, adding, "It's all small stuff."
The biggest blow what that DLR never really quit, and was never really fired. It was a mutual separation.
When Jump reached the top of the charts, one of the songs behind it was among the more unusual success stories of the era. 99 Luft Ballons had been a hit in Europe for the German band Nena. They decided to do an English language version, and it caught fire in the States, eventually reaching 2 on the Billboard chart when Jump was at the top. The English title, 99 Red Balloons, is not a direct translation, no matter what lunkheaded MTV VJ Alan Hunter claimed. Luft = air, not red. Luftwaffe = air force, not red force. Interestingly, the band never liked the English translation, feeling it didn't capture the spirit of the original at all. As a result, they have never to this date performed the English language version in concert. I especially liked that they played both versions on MTV. As a kid who took German in school, it was pretty nifty to see Falco and Nena singing in that language on my TV! Especially in the days long before the internet, where seeing anything in another language was very rare. Everyone's a Captain Kirk! Fun fact: in 2006, according to Wikipedia, VH1 Classic ran a fundraiser for Hurricane Katrina relief. If you donated a certain amount, you would be allowed to select a video to play. One viewer gave $35,000, and requested that the station play the English and German versions of this song repeatedly for an hour. He got his wish, and the station did just that from 2 to 3 PM EST on March 26, 2006.
March of 1984 saw the release of one of the greatest and most influential "rock" films of all time: This is Spinal Tap. The film introduced an entirely new genre into films: the Mockumentary, and is as much a brilliant piss-take on documentary films as it is a parody of hard rock music. For those who haven't seen it, SEE IT! Basically, Spinal Tap was a fictional band created by Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. The idea is that these guys have been kicking around since the early sixties (there are some hilarious "archival clips" of their previous incarnations as a skiffle band and as a muddled psych band). Currently more a heavy metal band, they have been steadily losing fan base since the seventies, but still soldier on, performing to ever smaller audiences, but still hoping their next big comeback is right around the corner. The film was essentially improvised: the actors knew certain facts about their characters, and were given the start and end points of their scenes, but otherwise the camera was turned on and they filmed whatever happened. In a way, it WAS a documentary, even if the characters weren't real. Besides the long shelf life for the band Spinal Tap, who have repeatedly reappeared in various forms since the movie's release, the film was also the directorial debut of Rob Reiner, Meathead from All in the Family, who went on to make movies like Stand by Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally. And of course, the many 'mockumentary' films that have come since then all owe a debt to the original.
"Jump" And 6th grade continues to flash by my eyes in sometimes excruciating detail. Thank god for the music of the time...I hated my school and had trouble making friends. I'd heard the name Van Halen a few times before but had never really explored hard rock beyond KISS. But "Jump" came out and headed straight for the charts. Suddenly Van Halen were a household name even in households where they were hated. Looking back, the synths seem not so much a "sellout" as a logical extension of what they'd been doing on the last album or two. And as someone noted, we still got the screaming guitar solos in most of the songs. I always consider Roth-era Van Halen to be the dividing line between hard rock and metal. Anything harder/heavier is metal, and anything less hard/heavy is hard rock. There will be 3 other really good singles from 1984: "I'll Wait," "Panama," and "Hot For Teacher." All had memorable videos except "I'll Wait," which didn't have a video. "I'll Wait" is all synth, while "Panama" and "Hot For Teacher" could've been on any of the early albums. It was always a pleasure for this 12-year-old to get some Van Halen on MTV in early to mid '84. And their look was highly influential...ripped jeans/spandex/torn t-shirts/bandanas worn around the neck or around the leg. That was more or less "the look" for the rest of the '80s for that scene, with ever-increasing amounts of makeup... The goodwill (if that's the right word) that Van Halen engendered throughout '84 ensured that DLR's early solo career would be automatic success. I'm not sure how high on the charts his early '85 Beach Boys cover got, so I'm probably skipping ahead. I just remember that we "automatically" liked it thanks to Van Halen. And then, seemingly out of the blue, he left VH... Love "Spinal Tap" although I didn't see it until much later (1992-ish?) They had a "mini-comeback" in the early '90s with a "real" reunion album called Break Like The Wind, so that's what might've convinced me to finally check them out. But it's one of those movies I can't watch anymore due to overexposure.
Spinal Tap started out as part of a spoof of The Midnight Special as aired on a failed 1979 pilot called The T.V. Show which aired one late night in the summer of 1979 on ABC. In general, it was meant as an American version of the Canadian sketch comedy series SCTV. Here, from that program, is them performing "Rock 'N' Roll Nightmare": Incidentally, Reiner was part of that project, as were Messrs. Guest, McKean and Shearer. There were other parts one should seek out. Billy Crystal as Muhammad Ali interviewed by Shearer as Tom Snyder. The "Stop Death In Our Lifetime" telethon. And a few others I can't get to for self-evident reasons.
Van Halen - Jump The synth riff definitely grabs me and it has since I first heard it. It's a catchy riff. This song is extremely keyboard-heavy and that's a big turn for a band that's thought of as primarily a "guitar band". I get people's frustration with this song that we don't get anything interesting from the guitar until the solo, which is a good one. Still, the frustration is legitimate. A band has to grow, as do individual musicians...Eddie Van Halen in this case. This is getting into a much larger topic of conversation rather than just "Jump" as a song, but my frustration as a VH fan is always that there wasn't innovation or even pushing his own limits with the keyboard playing. It's a completely different way of writing a song, but it's always a bit of a downer (esp. on the albums with Sammy Hagar) that this dude who was truly innovative on the guitar traded that in to put out average keyboard songs. My guess, and I have no proof of this, is that EVH became more concerned with writing songs rather that rewriting what was possible with his instrument. While that's certainly his decision as a creative musician, as a fan it does disappoint me a bit. Anyway, this song. JUMP! I still really like this song. It's fun and Van Halen were a fun band. It's cool to see a legitimate hard rock band hit #1 on the singles chart. As I said, the keyboard riff is huge hook. The whole middle section is really well done with the guitar and keyboard solos. From the whole band...the entire arrangement of that section is fantastic. David Lee Roth's vocal is a classic one. He's got such a distinctive voice and I love hearing him in his prime. I still love this song. Video thoughts: Since the video wasn't posted, I'll put it here. It's clearly extremely cheaply produced and not much happens, other than the band playing on a soundstage and goofing for the camera. It doesn't need a high concept to be a fun video. I don't consider VH to be metal either. As @The Slug Man said, they're right on that line. I think their debut could've gone in either direction, but they clearly went into the "party band" area with occasionally dipping their toes into the "heavy metal" pool.
