After Eddie Van Halen’s Death, Heavy Metal Must Confront Its Mortality

On October 6, 2020, legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen lost his battle with throat cancer, and died at the age of 65. Eddie’s guitar wizardry inspired generations of young heshers to pick up an axe and forge their own path through the fires of heavy metal, while his band’s electrifying onstage acrobatics provided a blueprint for countless high-voltage concerts to come. Born to a Dutch father and Indonesian mother, in his later years Van Halen also spoke out about the racism and xenophobia his family encountered. Van Halen was one of a kind, and while he is survived by his current bandmates—brother Alex and Eddie’s son, Wolfgang—his passing hammered yet another nail in the coffin for heavy metal’s old guard. A genre that was first forged in the shadows of a Birmingham factory some 50 years ago and then blown worldwide by a wild wind is finally beginning to show its age.

Heavy metal musicians aren’t exactly known for their long life expectancies. Spinal Tap jokes about spontaneously combusting drummers aside, the genre is known for being physically demanding and mentally draining, augmented by grueling tour schedules and, for most bands, the added stress of having to make ends meet once they get home. Many lionized figures have died young, or tragically, or both, from beloved 34- year old Power Trip frontman Riley Gale and Iron Age’s 38-year-old Wade Allison to Death’s 34-year-old Chuck Schuldiner and 43-year-old Huntress vocalist Jill Janus. The accidental deaths of twentysomethings Randy Rhoads and Metallica bassist Cliff Burton still loom large in the metal imagination.

The 2010s have been particularly cruel to metal fans. Motorhead frontman Lemmy is gone now, as are his brothers in arms, “Fast” Eddie Clarke and Phil “Filthy Animal” Taylor. Rainbow (and occasional Black Sabbath) frontman Ronnie James Dio is gone. Slayer guitarist Jeff Hanneman is dead, and so is Slayer itself. Celtic Frost’s Martin Eric Ain passed on in 2017. Maryland doom metal icon Alfred Morris III died in 2018, the same year as Black Death’s Vincent Lindsay. 71-year-old Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of the Black Sabbath boys are in bad shape, with diagnoses ranging from Parkinson’s to stomach cancer; Iron Maiden’s 62-year-old air raid siren Bruce Dickinson is already a throat cancer survivor; Judas Priest’s leather-clad ringleader Rob Halford remains hale and hearty (and sober), but is nearing his 70th birthday, and his bandmate, 72-year-old Glen Tipton, had to stop playing live following a 2018 Parkinson’s diagnosis. Swedish death metal greats Entombed's 48-year-old former vocalist LG Petrov is battling incurable cancer.

Lemmy’s death in 2015 sent a particular shockwave through the metal world. Several other titans of the genre had passed prior to that, but the fictional Lone Rangers spoke for everyone when they declared “Lemmy is a god.” . Like the Rolling Stones’ grizzled guitarist Keith Richards, Lemmy was supposed to be unkillable—and he certainly wasn’t supposed to get old. And yet, there he was onstage, struggling to finish “Ace of Spades,” and in the press, admitting that he’d had to give up his beloved Jack Daniels and amphetamines due to health concerns. By the end, even his trademark black cowboy hat couldn’t mask his exhaustion. “I don't see why there should be a point where everyone decides you're too old,” a defiant Lemmy had said in a 2005 interview. “I'm not too old, and until I decide I'm too old I'll never be too fucking old.”

Ultimately, that decision was made for him. Lemmy exemplified the “die with your boots on” mentality that the original wave of heavy metal godparents continues to embrace. Judas Priest are currently doing a string of European festival dates, and have a U.S. tour planned for 2021—as does Iron Maiden. Former Runaway and solo shredder Lita Ford will be touring through 2022. Occult rockers Coven, whose seminal Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls album dropped in 1969 and provided inspiration for Black Sabbath, have a 2021 festival date on the books. Black Sabbath themselves wrapped up what was billed as their farewell tour in 2017, but Ozzy himself has a run of final solo dates that stretch into 2022. As he told Spin last month, “I haven’t done my last gig yet. Even if it’s just to do one gig, I will do a gig. Then I’ll feel like I finished my job.”

More than almost any other genre, heavy metal venerates the past. Newer fans who come into the fold without at least a passing familiarity with the classics run the risk of being mocked as “posers” or “hipsters”; to call oneself a metalhead without having at least a working knowledge of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden is a cardinal sin. Every metal subgenre, from grindcore to funeral doom, can be traced back to those original building blocks, and understanding those connections is key to understanding metal as a whole. It’s also become a generational pursuit, with metalhead parents bringing their children to see their favorites and buying them their first metal T-shirts.

When one of those icons becomes gravely ill or dies, thee loss cuts across multiple generations. Metal has never achieved the same level of mainstream success that other genres enjoy, and so when one of our few famous faces disappears, it hurts. The very first generation of metal fans—people who saw Black Sabbath’s first gig or got their hands on Iron Maiden’s first demo in 1978—is still alive, but aging just as fast as their heroes. They’ve been steadily losing their favorite figureheads for years, and now, with a deadly pandemic to contend with and live shows off the table for the foreseeable future, metal fans of all ages are being forced to confront their own mortality from multiple angles.

When the last of the old guard falls, who will be there to take their place? It is a sobering thought, but luckily for metal fans, there are now multiple generations ready to take hold of the torch. The era of the rock god may be over, but for a genre as anti-establishment as heavy metal, that framework never made much sense anyway. Heavy metal’s new bloods are more diverse, more inclusive, more extreme, more radical, and more experimental than their predecessors, and are ultimately a bit more comfortable with showing their own humanity, too.

So don’t fear the reaper, because for every revered guitar virtuoso shredding a riff to pieces or frenetic vocalist screaming bloody gore onstage, there will always be another new legend waiting in the wings. If Ozzy’s not afraid of dying, then there’s no need to worry about the possibility, and as Lemmy himself said all those years ago, life’s all a gamble anyway. “My ethic is: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, White Line Fever. “You can be as careful as you want, but you’re going to die anyway, so why not have fun?”

Originally Appeared on GQ