Generation X lost another icon today. Eddie Van Halen, founding member of hard rock band VAN HALEN, died just a short while ago from cancer in Santa Monica, CA. He was 65 years old. Tributes by the thousands are being posted to Facebook. At this very moment, everyone I know from this generation seems to be offering their digital condolences while pulling out their “1984” vinyl, their original cassette, or are queueing the band’s music on their digital devices, listening, reminiscing, and sharing memories with each other. I myself just hit “PLAY>” for background mood music as I write this. Honestly, just hearing the opening track put a lump in my throat.
This isn’t just your regular celebrity death. This is a big deal pop culturally and musically speaking. Bigger than most any other Gen X deaths to date. Eddie provided the soundtrack to some of THE most iconic moments of pop culture, and our lives.
As the band were already somewhat established, but still definitely not yet reaching the inevitable stratospheric stardom, he was recruited by Michael Jackson to play the guitar for the song “Beat It” featured on the greatest selling album of all time, “Thriller”. The moment his guitar chords riff, the air around you is electrified, and you turn the volume up. If you were a Jackson fan then, you were also an Eddie Van Halen fan by proxy. In the recipe of making this song one of the biggest hits of the decade, I posit that Eddie’s guitar playing is just as important as Jackson’s video dance moves.
In January of the following year, 1984, Van Halen released their sixth studio album, aptly titled “1984”. It went 5x platinum within 12 months, solidifying the entire band as superstars. That album was the personal hard rock soundtrack for everyone that year, whether you were listening through the orange foam speakers of your Sony Walkman headset while riding the bus, cruising to the mall with friends in the back seat of their parents’ car, or blasting the synths of “Jump” with the windows down in the parking lot of the local Sonic Drive-In with your crew on a Friday night after the local highschool football game.
Mtv helped boost the band just as much as the band contributed to solidifying Mtv as a rock music television station. Their videos came complete with guitars, spandex, and babes in bikinis and high heels, especially in clips like “Hot For Teacher”. Plus live performance videos of the band playing their instruments “flying” across the stage suspended by wires. Those images became iconic, and prescribed what every other rock band should do in videos to keep up with the times.
It’s a bit jolting for Generation X to see someone of this caliber pass, but Gen X has dealt with these iconic Gen-era-deaths before. On each rare occasion, it forces us to confront our own age and mortality. We aren’t great at that. We are a generation whose own self image is centered around youth and vitality, in part, because of the onslaught of youth-aimed pop culture media we demanded and revelled in.
We were once warned by Allison Reynolds in The Breakfast Club, “When you grow up, your heart dies”. We heard that, listened, and we refused to ever let that happen.
We are the generation that made it acceptable to wear sneakers and a band t-shirt to professional office meetings. As well as the generation to begin buying toys as “collectors items”, and passing them off with the more mature term “action figures”.
We are also the first generation of in-home entertainment; Cable, VHS, Atari gaming system, and the personal computer all arrived into our homes within a couple years of each other. Then we wanted “OUR Mtv”, and got more than we could have ever imagined. Because of that combo, we received an 80s version of “influencers” on the air waves that will forever be frozen in the amber of that era along with us, never to age.
Yes, we know we are now all crossing over into our 40s and 50s, losing hair, or going grey, but in our heads we will always be that kid with the Walkman in white high top Reeboks, that kid with the mall version New Wave hair-do, that kid being babysat by Mtv while doing homework until the parents got home from their jobs. We will always be “young” in heart, and will always see ourselves that way, no matter that the number of candles on our cake has far exceeded 16, or witness our Gen-anthems being used as familiar retro-references to sell cars, lottery tickets, or insurance. So, when we say we are mourning Eddie Van Halen, we are also mourning the distance of our youth. We are mourning the passing of an era. We are mourning the loss of true authenticity in our artists, and Eddie is CLEARLY among them.
When Michael Jackson died, it shook the Earth in 2009. It didn’t matter what Michael did after Thriller, either professionally or personally (I’m not excusing any allegations here). 1983 Thriller-era-Michael Jackson is what Gen X was concerned about and whom we mourned, not what he evolved into. THAT Michael belonged to US. We obsessed over the “Thriller” video, and learned the dance moves in our living rooms. We bought the original vinyl album, then we upgraded to the CD in the 90s, and then downloaded it digitally in the 2000s.
Then John Hughes passed almost 3 weeks later. For the latchkey kids, and misfits of 80s youth, this was akin to a father figuring dying. He was at the head of our generations’ Thanksgiving table every year, bringing together the brains, the athletes, basketcases, princesses, and criminals all at one “family” gathering, serving a fantastic meal of truth, self relevance, and teen angst, with a side of levity and 80s attitude. Not only were we welcome, we had a valid voice at that dinner table, because it was OUR dinner table too. He made sure we knew that, and we thought he was “a righteous dude” for it. We all went back for second and third helpings, then fell into a deep tryptophanic “John Hughes-iverse” coma.
On an April morning in 2016, the world woke up to find out that Prince had “ascended” to whatever place music deities go to when their time on Earth has come to an end. There was a near non-stop global celebration of his life and music for days afterwards. MTV even put aside their cash cow reality programming in favor of showing a full 24 hours of Prince videos and movies. That alone is extremely significant and indicative of his cultural importance, because music on MUSIC TELEVISION, founded by Boomers as an inadvertent gift for Gen X, had become completely obsolete in the early to mid 2000s between a plethora of Road Rules Challenges and the world discovering what a Kardashian is. Mtv knew they owed him, and US, that level of reverence for that moment, and they genuflected in homage.
Eddie Van Halen will be remembered as Gen X Hendrix. One of THE great guitar gods and musical influencers of all time, if not THE best guitar player. (In 2012, he was named the best guitar player of all time by Guitar World magazine.) He was to 80s hard rock guitar, what MJ was to dance, what Prince was to funk and style, and what John Hughes was to misfit teens and 80s soundtracks. THAT is how we measure him, and what the gravity of Van Halen’s death means for us today upon hearing about his passing. And I mean US, Gen X. He belongs to us.
Yes, he started in the 70s, but became a superstar in the Mtv era, our era, and we made him a god just as much as he made us feel like a god in our own lives when we popped in the cassette, cruised Main Street, Anywhere U.S.A on the weekends with our friends, and played air guitar along with him.
There ain’t nobody around today like those four, and never will be. Not just because they are of our generation, but because of what that specific time in pop culture and society meant and represented to the world then, and even now as we reflect upon it. Eddie Van Halen was a HUGE part of that.
We lost not only an artist with the passing of Eddie Van Halen, but we lost another square piece in the Rubik’s Cube that is our era. And it IS our era, forever. However, we have been more than happy to share him with future eras. Because, and I quote, “Everybody Wants Some”.
Eddie Van Halen
1955-2020
May you “Riff” In Peace
