I want to make a calm and collected argument of why Van Halen is bad. I think that it is a good idea to point out what makes them bad.

It would be wrong to totally denounce Van Halen, they are very skilled musicians. They just don't know how to make good music. It's pretty simple really, songs are about the music, not about showing off. If your goal in writing a song is to show how good you are at a particular instrument, you probably aren't capable of writing anything worth listening to.

Van Halen had a lot go wrong with their style and technique. They started out with David Lee Roth as their lead singer, and switched to Sammy Hagar after he left. I've heard a lot of people say that it isn't that Van Halen is bad, it's that Van Hagar is bad. I don't know about that, it seems to me that they always sound essentially the same, they follow the same technique in virtually every song they ever produced.

First the song opens with a guitar riff or maybe a slow byuildup that leads to a guitar riff, regardless, 30 seconds into the song the guitar will be playing the main riff of the song. They will then start singing over it and go to a chorus, so far there is nothing wrong with this besides the fact that they are predictable. But after they play that or sometimes repeat that, they break into a terrible guitar solo. Don't get me wrong, Eddie Van Halen knows what he's doing with a guitar and if he was showing me how much he'd practiced and just kind of showing off a bit it would be good, but in this scenario it ruins the song.

The song is ruined because the solo almost never actually fits with the song. It actually is further from the song than anything. It just sounds like someone is trying to show off, if you don't believe me, go find a van halen song quickly and listen to it.

I've had people argue before that Jimi Hendrix did the same thing, and although I won't go into detail about this as this is focusing on Van Halen's badness rather than Jimi's amazingness, Jimi Hendrix knew how to both show off and fit into a song at once, that is what made him such a genius.

Van Halen never could figure out how to make that balance between showing off and creating something that isn't terrible, which is why, I asssume, they just opted for terrible show-offy music.

By all means comment but I really don't think that after you break down Van Halen's music for yourself, there is a lot to defend.