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This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished. It also reminds me that Death just dragged another bead on his aba

This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished. It also reminds me that Death just dragged another bead on his abacus and before long my bead will be up. Also, while I respect and admire what Eddie has done to further the art of playing electric guitar, I must confess I much more enjoy Eddie The Songwriter rather than Eddie The Guitarist.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
> This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished Then you need to stop wading in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world. In terms of just music alone, there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. Two generations or more of musical education where none really existed before, plus an entire generation that saw making a living as a musician as a possibility (whether or not that was true) has led to a situation where almost every town of 50k people or more has musicians in it who are as almost as good or better than any who ever lived. I am fairly confident that the same thing is true of writing, painting, photography, dance: the pool of talent is out there. If you're as old as you semi-suggest, it gets harder and harder to encounter it. I'm 57 and I have to work quite hard to ensure that I keep exposing myself to new artists and creatives - the natural tendency is to just look back on all the people I discovered between 17 and 27 and then lament them dying. Don't do it! YouTube is a miracle in this respect. There's so much incredible talent and invention out there. Every generation has people in it for you to respect, and they too will die and become the "legends of old". [* edited "wallowing" => "wading"; did not mean to sound so harsh ]
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Then you need to stop wallowing in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world. Don't be a jerk. A guy is dead. He's mourning the loss. Let him.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    I changed the wording slightly. Wasn't trying to be harsh or a jerk.
    - gist 6y ago
      I didn't see your exact wording before but just the same to me what you said is ok. HN (or really any forum) shouldn't be a place where people have to fear saying what they really think. I want to know what someone really thinks not what they think they have to say so that others don't jump on top of them and get them into line with what you are supposed to say. Maybe someone should draw a line if a close relative of friend died but not a public figure celebrity etc. I read your comment more like 'get a life if this is what upsets you in some way'. What I think? Didn't like his music (not a fan) but even if it was someone who I liked it wouldn't matter to me. For one thing (not the only thing one thing) none of these artists are typically making any good music anymore and even if they did the entertainment they provided can be easily replaced by another of thousands of artists. By the way I would feel the same way about the worship by people about some tech figure dying or getting sick. It's not because it's music. Harsh? Point is I don't think people should assume that everyone cares about this nor should people be afraid that they won't say the right or sensitive thing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ct-1111 6y ago
  I got the same feeling as brtkdotse when Chris Cornell of Soundgarden died. "They aren't making them like that anymore". And if they are, I haven't found any. Can you give us an example (like a YouTube link) of a modern guitarist (from the past 15 or so years) that approaches Eddie Van Halen's level of talent or innovation? An uplifting thought is that, like Cornell, although we have lost him, we still have his music. Another "hacker's guitarist" is Tom Sholz of Boston. If the younger generation has never heard of him, his story is amazing too (an MIT trained engineer; rock star; built his own gear; wrote, played, recorded and produced his own work): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz While his style is a little different than EVH, he has a similar innovative spirit.
  - dlivingston 6y ago
    My impression is that rock and roll is...well, dead. Genres wax and wane in popularity, and so does the talent in that genre, as talent becomes attracted to other genres (you ask who the modern day Van Halen is: who is the modern day B.B. King? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Mozart? On some level, it's a silly question, because those genres have become somewhat passé). A few years ago, garage band rock n' roll was topping the charts: The Black Keys, The White Stripes, The Arctic Monkeys, etc. Now, not so much - or at all. But as much as my soul is warmed by a tasty guitar lick, I'm okay with that, because the seasons change and all we can do is watch as they do.
    - beaugunderson 6y ago
      finding new (to me) bands that sound like the old bands I like is much easier given tools like everynoise.com, which I highly recommend (though it works best if you also have a Spotify account because of the playlists). my current heavy rotation playlist of EVH-style guitar shredding is here, if anyone is interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6iCImsdr0rrYHStbFpOi2h?si=ibMXqPPWSt-Y2GCrr-ASgw https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6iCImsdr0rrYHStbFpOi2h?si=... vastly different sound but the technical mastery is apparent.
      - ateng 6y ago
- TheCondor 6y ago
  There is a lot more talent out there today but I think it's the combination of the talent combined with the fame and recognition that makes the hero. Eddie was very good, as are many other folks, but he was also a guitar hero and most really good players are not. The world of "guitar heroes" got one smaller and I don't know who is filling it up going forward. It was the CEO of Fender that not long ago lamented that John Mayer (maybe one of the best contemporary guitar players around, he is very talented) doesn't sell guitars the same way as youth aren't trying to emulate him like they did some of those other guys like Van Halen. That and someone had to sort of do that stuff "first." It's going to be hard to reinvent tapping or impress the world by touching a drill to the strings again, I don't see it happening any time soon. Maybe I'm wrong and a whole new world of of guitar techniques will be discovered running it though a DJ turntable and scratching and cutting or something. I don't know. Maybe it's also just a quality of our time, hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    > hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time. i'd wager that's because hardcore blues fans are mostly of a certain age too, like the GP here, and can only focus clearly on the death of people they discovered in their late teens and early 20s. you're right about the "guitar hero" thing, but for me personally, i just can't care about that. i'm into the music, not the personality. i don't sell guitars, so i don't have to care if the undoubtedly talented mayer isn't causing sales to rise.
- jariel 6y ago
  "there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. " No there isn't really - totally the opposite. The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades. In the 1920s-1950s 'musician' was a 'job'. Then the phonograph became big, the number dropped by 90% then over a few more decades another 90%. It's no longer an occupation, it's just a hobby. There are tons of people who take 'fine arts' at Uni etc. but they're not necessarily that good, and very few of them will be able to work in the field and develop careers. 'Orchestral' even on big albums is all fake, it's just to easy to do and too expensive otherwise. 'Creative' yes, a lot of that, but have a look at the Billboard 100. It's 'audible creativity' but all made by algorithms, it's more 'art' than it is 'music' in some sense. The other issue is that the bar to entry is lower as well, so for every 'extra genius' we get out of that 'open process' there are also 1000x more posers, fakers, people just making arbitrary sounds and it's harder to wade the the noise. 'The system' used to do that for us i.e. the musical community would 'find' the talent generally. There is no 'system' now, just YouTube. Thanks for they Polyphia link though.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    > The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades. This is completely orthogonal to the question how much talent there is. The fact that less people can make a living doing something that doesn't require any capital investment, just time and skill, doesn't have any real direct impact on how many people get really good at it. "It's just a hobby" is a weak put-down, and really doesn't apply to thousands of people who play instruments at incredibly high levels of skill, even though they do not do so for a living. Certainly, it's going to help development if you play more (for whatever reason). But I don't think that you can claim that only way to get to be "that good" is to be a paid professional. There are many musicians whose early work as a "professional musician" was just a side gig anyway, and they didn't play significantly more than dedicated "hobbyists". The spread of music education (public and private) and the dramatic drop in the real cost of musical instruments has exposed way more people to the possibility of playing music. Sure, most of them will be in the middle of the bell curve, but this process has (1) lifted the absolute height of the bell curve (more people) which (2) means more people over at the right-hand end of the curve.
- anjc 6y ago
  You and everybody replying to you are making the same baffling mistake, i.e., assuming that technical/song writing ability/education = star. If you want technical ability, there are 8 year olds on YouTube with better chops than EVH. Possibly every 8 year old has better chops than Kurt Cobain. But technical ability does NOT make you a rock star. Same applies to the other fields you mention, painting etc. I'm sure young rock stars (in the same vein as EVH, Axl, Hendrix, Cobain, Morrison) would still exist as the personalities and talent are still there, but rock is not mainstream anymore, so they can't exist. The closest thing to real rock stars now are the likes of Justin Bieber. You should re-listen to the Beato/Satriani clip you told someone else to listen to, because he essentially says this. The artists you suggest are irrelevant and can not be compared to EVH in any way whatsoever. Guthrie Govan?! Van Halen drove mainstream culture. Nobody outside of guitar forums know Guthrie Govan. The other suggestions in this thread of comparators to EVH and Chris Cornell (Tosin Abasi, Petrucci, Belamy) are just embarrassing.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    and as I said separately, I'm not interested in the "rock star-y-ness" of any of the people you've mentioned (or all the other ones you could name). I'm interested in the music. EVH did, in fact, push this along with his technique and compositional ideas. I don't give a damn about his personality, or who becomes a "star". Almost none of my favorite musicians are stars, despite levels of creativity and technical ability that are hard to measure or even imagine for most of us. I wasn't suggesting that technique is everything. Great musicians have imagination and strong connections to existing cultures (even when they ignore them). But so many people talked about EVH in terms of his technique ("OMFG, did you see that Eruption solo?" etc. etc). And for reference, the "mainstream culture" I grew up in (London, 70s-early 80s) was unimpressed by EVH and american rock in general. But yes, rock is not mainstream anymore, and thus "rock stars" are not a thing. Bieber is not even close to being a "rock star" - we had "pop stars" all through the 60s and 70s and they were entirely distinct from the "rock stars" of those same eras.
saghm 6y ago
> I must confess I much more enjoy Eddie The Songwriter rather than Eddie The Guitarist I enjoy his guitar playing as well, but I agree with you here! I have the unpopular opinion that the stuff he was doing with the synth in the late Roth and throughout the Hagar era is better than some of the more traditional hard rock stuff. "Right Now" is one of my favorite songs ever, and it's relatively light on the guitar for a Van Halen song.
- chipotle_coyote 6y ago
  I agree with that, too. I know it's, ah, controversial to say that Van Halen's songs in the Sammy Hagar era were by and large their best, but -- even though I think David Lee Roth was the better singer (Hagar sounds oddly like he's straining all the time) -- I'm just more likely to go back to the "Van Hagar" songs. I know Hagar's suggested they were writing as a group during that period more than the band was previously, but I know he's not exactly an unbiased source there.
  - me_againnnnnn 6y ago
    Eddie became a better composer as he grew like most Musicians. His early work was based more on his guitar virtuosity.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Have listen to the whole "Fair Warning" album if you haven't before. It's got some very different styles.
- scns 6y ago
  I like I'll wait from 1984 a lot
abdullahkhalids 6y ago
https://www.alcor.org/ https://www.alcor.org/ "Extend your life with cryonics."

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

> This deeply saddens me, the pool of people I admire is draining faster than it’s replenished Then you need to stop wading in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world. In terms of just music alone, there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. Two generations or more of musical education where none really existed before, plus an entire generation that saw making a living as a musician as a possibility (whether or not that was true) has led to a situation where almost every town of 50k people or more has musicians in it who are as almost as good or better than any who ever lived. I am fairly confident that the same thing is true of writing, painting, photography, dance: the pool of talent is out there. If you're as old as you semi-suggest, it gets harder and harder to encounter it. I'm 57 and I have to work quite hard to ensure that I keep exposing myself to new artists and creatives - the natural tendency is to just look back on all the people I discovered between 17 and 27 and then lament them dying. Don't do it! YouTube is a miracle in this respect. There's so much incredible talent and invention out there. Every generation has people in it for you to respect, and they too will die and become the "legends of old". [* edited "wallowing" => "wading"; did not mean to sound so harsh ]

reaperducer 6y ago
Then you need to stop wallowing in the shallows of the people you admire and get out in the insane expanse that is the rest of the creative world. Don't be a jerk. A guy is dead. He's mourning the loss. Let him.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  I changed the wording slightly. Wasn't trying to be harsh or a jerk.
  - gist 6y ago
    I didn't see your exact wording before but just the same to me what you said is ok. HN (or really any forum) shouldn't be a place where people have to fear saying what they really think. I want to know what someone really thinks not what they think they have to say so that others don't jump on top of them and get them into line with what you are supposed to say. Maybe someone should draw a line if a close relative of friend died but not a public figure celebrity etc. I read your comment more like 'get a life if this is what upsets you in some way'. What I think? Didn't like his music (not a fan) but even if it was someone who I liked it wouldn't matter to me. For one thing (not the only thing one thing) none of these artists are typically making any good music anymore and even if they did the entertainment they provided can be easily replaced by another of thousands of artists. By the way I would feel the same way about the worship by people about some tech figure dying or getting sick. It's not because it's music. Harsh? Point is I don't think people should assume that everyone cares about this nor should people be afraid that they won't say the right or sensitive thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ct-1111 6y ago
I got the same feeling as brtkdotse when Chris Cornell of Soundgarden died. "They aren't making them like that anymore". And if they are, I haven't found any. Can you give us an example (like a YouTube link) of a modern guitarist (from the past 15 or so years) that approaches Eddie Van Halen's level of talent or innovation? An uplifting thought is that, like Cornell, although we have lost him, we still have his music. Another "hacker's guitarist" is Tom Sholz of Boston. If the younger generation has never heard of him, his story is amazing too (an MIT trained engineer; rock star; built his own gear; wrote, played, recorded and produced his own work): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Scholz While his style is a little different than EVH, he has a similar innovative spirit.
- dlivingston 6y ago
  My impression is that rock and roll is...well, dead. Genres wax and wane in popularity, and so does the talent in that genre, as talent becomes attracted to other genres (you ask who the modern day Van Halen is: who is the modern day B.B. King? Or Frank Sinatra? Or Mozart? On some level, it's a silly question, because those genres have become somewhat passé). A few years ago, garage band rock n' roll was topping the charts: The Black Keys, The White Stripes, The Arctic Monkeys, etc. Now, not so much - or at all. But as much as my soul is warmed by a tasty guitar lick, I'm okay with that, because the seasons change and all we can do is watch as they do.
  - beaugunderson 6y ago
    finding new (to me) bands that sound like the old bands I like is much easier given tools like everynoise.com, which I highly recommend (though it works best if you also have a Spotify account because of the playlists). my current heavy rotation playlist of EVH-style guitar shredding is here, if anyone is interested: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6iCImsdr0rrYHStbFpOi2h?si=ibMXqPPWSt-Y2GCrr-ASgw https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6iCImsdr0rrYHStbFpOi2h?si=... vastly different sound but the technical mastery is apparent.
    - ateng 6y ago
TheCondor 6y ago
There is a lot more talent out there today but I think it's the combination of the talent combined with the fame and recognition that makes the hero. Eddie was very good, as are many other folks, but he was also a guitar hero and most really good players are not. The world of "guitar heroes" got one smaller and I don't know who is filling it up going forward. It was the CEO of Fender that not long ago lamented that John Mayer (maybe one of the best contemporary guitar players around, he is very talented) doesn't sell guitars the same way as youth aren't trying to emulate him like they did some of those other guys like Van Halen. That and someone had to sort of do that stuff "first." It's going to be hard to reinvent tapping or impress the world by touching a drill to the strings again, I don't see it happening any time soon. Maybe I'm wrong and a whole new world of of guitar techniques will be discovered running it though a DJ turntable and scratching and cutting or something. I don't know. Maybe it's also just a quality of our time, hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  > hardcore blues fans have sort of lamented the dying off of the greats for a long time. i'd wager that's because hardcore blues fans are mostly of a certain age too, like the GP here, and can only focus clearly on the death of people they discovered in their late teens and early 20s. you're right about the "guitar hero" thing, but for me personally, i just can't care about that. i'm into the music, not the personality. i don't sell guitars, so i don't have to care if the undoubtedly talented mayer isn't causing sales to rise.
jariel 6y ago
"there's more talent out there now than there ever was before. " No there isn't really - totally the opposite. The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades. In the 1920s-1950s 'musician' was a 'job'. Then the phonograph became big, the number dropped by 90% then over a few more decades another 90%. It's no longer an occupation, it's just a hobby. There are tons of people who take 'fine arts' at Uni etc. but they're not necessarily that good, and very few of them will be able to work in the field and develop careers. 'Orchestral' even on big albums is all fake, it's just to easy to do and too expensive otherwise. 'Creative' yes, a lot of that, but have a look at the Billboard 100. It's 'audible creativity' but all made by algorithms, it's more 'art' than it is 'music' in some sense. The other issue is that the bar to entry is lower as well, so for every 'extra genius' we get out of that 'open process' there are also 1000x more posers, fakers, people just making arbitrary sounds and it's harder to wade the the noise. 'The system' used to do that for us i.e. the musical community would 'find' the talent generally. There is no 'system' now, just YouTube. Thanks for they Polyphia link though.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  > The number of professional musicians has dropped dramatically over the decades. This is completely orthogonal to the question how much talent there is. The fact that less people can make a living doing something that doesn't require any capital investment, just time and skill, doesn't have any real direct impact on how many people get really good at it. "It's just a hobby" is a weak put-down, and really doesn't apply to thousands of people who play instruments at incredibly high levels of skill, even though they do not do so for a living. Certainly, it's going to help development if you play more (for whatever reason). But I don't think that you can claim that only way to get to be "that good" is to be a paid professional. There are many musicians whose early work as a "professional musician" was just a side gig anyway, and they didn't play significantly more than dedicated "hobbyists". The spread of music education (public and private) and the dramatic drop in the real cost of musical instruments has exposed way more people to the possibility of playing music. Sure, most of them will be in the middle of the bell curve, but this process has (1) lifted the absolute height of the bell curve (more people) which (2) means more people over at the right-hand end of the curve.
anjc 6y ago
You and everybody replying to you are making the same baffling mistake, i.e., assuming that technical/song writing ability/education = star. If you want technical ability, there are 8 year olds on YouTube with better chops than EVH. Possibly every 8 year old has better chops than Kurt Cobain. But technical ability does NOT make you a rock star. Same applies to the other fields you mention, painting etc. I'm sure young rock stars (in the same vein as EVH, Axl, Hendrix, Cobain, Morrison) would still exist as the personalities and talent are still there, but rock is not mainstream anymore, so they can't exist. The closest thing to real rock stars now are the likes of Justin Bieber. You should re-listen to the Beato/Satriani clip you told someone else to listen to, because he essentially says this. The artists you suggest are irrelevant and can not be compared to EVH in any way whatsoever. Guthrie Govan?! Van Halen drove mainstream culture. Nobody outside of guitar forums know Guthrie Govan. The other suggestions in this thread of comparators to EVH and Chris Cornell (Tosin Abasi, Petrucci, Belamy) are just embarrassing.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  and as I said separately, I'm not interested in the "rock star-y-ness" of any of the people you've mentioned (or all the other ones you could name). I'm interested in the music. EVH did, in fact, push this along with his technique and compositional ideas. I don't give a damn about his personality, or who becomes a "star". Almost none of my favorite musicians are stars, despite levels of creativity and technical ability that are hard to measure or even imagine for most of us. I wasn't suggesting that technique is everything. Great musicians have imagination and strong connections to existing cultures (even when they ignore them). But so many people talked about EVH in terms of his technique ("OMFG, did you see that Eruption solo?" etc. etc). And for reference, the "mainstream culture" I grew up in (London, 70s-early 80s) was unimpressed by EVH and american rock in general. But yes, rock is not mainstream anymore, and thus "rock stars" are not a thing. Bieber is not even close to being a "rock star" - we had "pop stars" all through the 60s and 70s and they were entirely distinct from the "rock stars" of those same eras.

saghm 6y ago

> I must confess I much more enjoy Eddie The Songwriter rather than Eddie The Guitarist I enjoy his guitar playing as well, but I agree with you here! I have the unpopular opinion that the stuff he was doing with the synth in the late Roth and throughout the Hagar era is better than some of the more traditional hard rock stuff. "Right Now" is one of my favorite songs ever, and it's relatively light on the guitar for a Van Halen song.

chipotle_coyote 6y ago
I agree with that, too. I know it's, ah, controversial to say that Van Halen's songs in the Sammy Hagar era were by and large their best, but -- even though I think David Lee Roth was the better singer (Hagar sounds oddly like he's straining all the time) -- I'm just more likely to go back to the "Van Hagar" songs. I know Hagar's suggested they were writing as a group during that period more than the band was previously, but I know he's not exactly an unbiased source there.
- me_againnnnnn 6y ago
  Eddie became a better composer as he grew like most Musicians. His early work was based more on his guitar virtuosity.
phkahler 6y ago
Have listen to the whole "Fair Warning" album if you haven't before. It's got some very different styles.
scns 6y ago
I like I'll wait from 1984 a lot

abdullahkhalids 6y ago

https://www.alcor.org/ https://www.alcor.org/ "Extend your life with cryonics."