Wolfgang Van Halen defends Billie Ellish for not knowing Van Halen

I didn't even know Billie Ellish was Hindustani!

 

It's not a relatively obscure tour, it's an enormously famous tour; one of the most famous and talked about pop cultural events of the 19th century. As famous as Beatlmania or Woodstock were in their time (there were such crowds mobbing Lind that the first-ever private, personally outfitted railway car was created to haul her around from tour stop to tour stop, it was like the first tour bus). It just took place not in living memory (though apparently it played a significant part in the Barnum movie musical that was recently done, which I haven't seen). Which is my whole point. Things aren't so different. What's different is who is doing the remembering and framing, and who knows the history or not.

I think you're over estimating the kind of difference that rock and roll created in the business of music. Industrialization made a huge change in the business of music-- there had been for thousands of years both a kind of professional presentation and a folk presentation of music, and I think in the industrial age the folk process became kind of industrialized and professionalized. And then recording and radio made a huge change in the nature of how audiences experiences music (though the process of copyright and publishing and selling music was pretty much imported from the days of selling sheet music). But popular music remained, and remains, kind of what it has been at least since the 19th century -- sentimental parlor ballads, vernacular dance music, novelty song. The styles change. The technology changes. But I don't think one style or another caused or drove any of those changes and I don't think one style or another created those business models.

But we'll just have to disagree on this one.

 

I personally love rock and grew up in the the 70s listening to 50s and 60s rock and of course all the stuff from the 70s. Graduated onto hard rock and metal in my teens and then indie rock. So lots of rock in my musical listening history.

But I just don't see rock as that important in the musical scheme of things. No more important than hip hop honestly. I listen to jazz, classical, rock, blues, country, hip hop, and whatever you want to call today's music. It's all good, but rock is no more important than any other and Van Halen is just a tiny, barely noticeable blip on the radar for me.

It boggles my mind that people feel so strongly that this kid should know or care about Van Halen.

 

I ****ing love Van Halen (pre 1986) but it's not like not knowing Mozart, Elvis, The Beatles, Springsteen, Dylan, etc. Get over thineselves.

 

The Oakland videos in 1981 were huge

 

Alright, now you’re treading on this millenial’s favorite band of all time. The word is getting out about control!

 

Yeah...those Drake fellas are a great band. I heard about them on The Google.

 

Before everyone beats Billie up, remember this isn't the first time. I remember the video that went viral a year or so back where DLR, looking more like a slimmed down Rodney Dangerfield than like an aging rock star from 40 years ago, hears "Jump" blasting from a room with a bunch of fratboys listening to a mix of music... he goes in to surprise them expecting they would be starstruck by the man they were just listening to, and none of them recognized him or cared who this old dude was.

I think there's a shot people may know "Jump" and a few other classics by them but not really caring who sang it or even who the lead singer was. We're in a post-MTV age where people walk their own musical paths and only a few select few artists are famous enough that they couldn't walk down the street anymore.

I remember about 2 years ago discovering a 20 year old coworker had no idea who Fleetwood Mac or Stevie Nicks were, and FM/SN have actually been much more active in the last decade than VH/DLR were and have had their music used extensively on American Horror Story and the sort. He mainly listens to hip hop and some country, why would he care? Whereas I know other co-workers in the same age group who adore Stevie Nicks.

 

I don’t know a lot of artists myself! As for Van Halen, the only two songs I know are “Jump” and the song used in the Crystal Pepsi commercial!

 

search results in SH music forum for the amazing Leikeli47 = 1 result, which is your post. Now 2, including mine, I suppose.

 

What are bad analogy.

When I was a kid, I still knew who Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington and Buddy Holly and Glenn Miller and Little Richard et al were even though I was at least a generation removed from them and their music bore little resemblance to my generation’s music.

 

To defend the folks here who don't know who Tierra Whack is (I do, sadly) , this forum mainly discusses records . i.e. physical product , which these artists don't produce.
I recently found out that billie Eilish played a club in Philly (and sold it out) two years ago when she was 15. Strictly on the popularity of her internet presence. Most of the kids there brought their parents as chaperones. Totally under my radar.
It is a whole new ballgame.

 

I still discover new artists all the time who have been around for generations. Thats the fun of musuc. Should she have come out of the womb to Eruption? You can't know everyone. How is this a discussion or an offense?

The fun of life for me is discovering new artists. Just got into Bill Fay is that an offense to Bill Fays fans? I just had not heard of him.

 

I'm a music buff and I didn't even know who Stevie Nicks was until a year ago.

 

Not related to the Billie issue, Wolfgang has signed with Explorer1 Music Group.


VAN HALEN bassist Wolfgang Van Halen has signed a deal with Explorer1 Music Group for the release of his debut solo album. According to Billboard, Wolfgang is in "the final stages" of recording the LP with producer Michael "Elvis" Baskette at VAN HALEN's 5150 Studios in California. The announcement calls the set "a collection of diverse material...original songs ranging from haunting ballads to stomping rock classics, on which [Van Halen] recorded all the instruments and vocals himself."

Wolfgang has been posting photos and videos from the studio at his Instagram account since early 2015.

He told The Pulse Of Radio a while back that his ability to play different instruments gave him the freedom to do what he wanted on a solo project. "I mean, I feel like it's just kind of open-ended," he said. "I feel like since I can play drums, bass, guitar and kind of sing, I guess, I can kind of just decide whatever I want to do. I mean, I've always loved the whole Dave Grohlstory of how he started FOO FIGHTERS — just did a whole demo album by himself."

His father described the project in 2015 as sounding like "AC/DC meets VAN HALEN meets aggressive pop," adding, "It's a little of everything and sounds like a freight train coming at you. I've never heard anything quite like it. It's so powerful that I'm jealous."