re: Is There A Worse Song Than...

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well that's simply not true, in fact I'd say most actual Van Halen fans don't like it while the rest of the population does.

Let's just take it at face value for it is, it's a pussy, poppy, dentist-rock easy listening tune that was made for radio play. Which is the exact opposite of VAN HALEN. Van Halen burst onto the scene with in your face kickass guitar shredding rock. Snorting lines, banging chicks, melting faces. That's Van Halen. Fast forward to 1984 and we've traded in the guitar for a fricking synthesizer. Oh sorry there is the token couple second eddie solo thrown in there to try to still make it sound hard but it's mostly out of place.

So yeah, that's why people don't like it. And it has nothing to do wihth being an a&m fan.

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It was shocking for a number of big VH fans to hear a synth, front and center, on one of their songs. And so a number of VH fans didn't like it because they didn't want the band they identified with as their rock band to have synths in a song. I totally get that at the time since the 80s were all about synths with pop bands.

But VH wasn't all hardcore all the time though. Their first top 20 hit was "Dance the Night Away." It was a pop song with a nice guitar riff - not "in your face kickass guitar shredding rock." Jump may have synths, but it's still a heavier sounding song than that. The bottom line is that it was a #1 song and their biggest hit, and many VH fans still loved the song. There is a reason that they played it in the encore and closed with it so many times. Decades after it came out and they were playing shows to less casual fans and more hardcore VH fans following their commercial peak, they still closed with the song. I believe it's the last song that was played at their last show as a group in 2015.

It was one of the few songs Roth-era songs that Hagar sang in concert and he said that when he first heard "Jump", he said he wished he would have written it. He said he knew it would be huge because it had a pop, crossover sound, but was still heavy and had great instrumentation. He said all the bands wanted to write a song like that. And Eddie Van Halen said he just wrote and worked on what he liked not caring about what had commercial appeal and what didn't.