There was a post from December 2019 over at Bob Lefsetz’s blog about Billie Eilish and Van Halen.

The post is an opinion piece about how Billie Eilish said she didn’t know who Van Halen is.

And Twitter at the time started it’s normal thing and suddenly Van Halen was trending. Like everyone else, I saw their name trending and thought that VH either had new music or something bad happened.

So should a 17 year old “home schooled pop singer” know who Van Halen is?

Growing up in the 80s (for those born in the late 60s and for those born in the 70s) there was no denying Van Halen.

But for a person born in 2003.

Van Halen wouldn’t be a thing. They were missing for most of the decade.

And even when Van Halen made their comeback in 2012, it didn’t really crossover into the mainstream news for a long period of time. Adele was ruling the charts and her year old album kept the “DLR VH” version from reaching the number 1 spot, something which the “DLR VH” version have never achieved, while the “Hagar VH” version did achieve a number 1 spot and Sammy was sure to point it out.

But even then, Billie Eilish who would have been 9 and would not have cared about Van Halen. Maybe if she wasn’t home schooled and went to a school with people who had different tastes, she would have seen Junior with a VH T-shirt being all hot for teacher.

In other words, if you weren’t a Van Halen fan, or had a ticket to the show, “A Different Kind Of Truth” was ignored. But for us fans who cared, Van Halen was back. We didn’t even care what the critics said about the recycled old riffs. Come on, this is EVH. His old riffs were still better than the riffs that the other guitarists at the time came out with.

Speaking of the young generation, when Sabbath reformed and Bill Ward was out, they used the Audioslave/Rage Against The Machine drummer Brad Wilk for the album and Tommy Clueftos from Ozzy’s solo band for the gigs.

And i was at the gig, standing on the floor with people around me and these two young dudes were blowing out at how good the Sabbath drummer has kept himself. I asked em if they thought it was the original drummer Bill Ward. And they said “yes”. And then I told em it wasn’t. And they looked confused. I googled Bill Ward and showed em. And they walked away pissed at me, like I ruined something for them.

And that’s the world we live in.