Metal Reviews

Yeah, sure thing.
Or perhaps it's, you know, just not to their personal taste.
Good for you, you like the watered down version of VH, I guess that makes you soooo mature. I'm sure I speak for thousands of others as well when I say I wish I could be just like you, so grown up and mature and all.
Oh, wait. You leveled a personal attack on others because they don't like the same albums as you... scratch that.

I was joking, of course, but since AOR stands for Adult Oriented Rock, you(and thousands of others) know what to listen to if you want to be mature and all...

I thought it was Album or sometimes Arena Oriented Rock .. but I suppose that would ruin the joke.

There was already a debate about that somewhere in the Hard rock section. imo, it's Adult Oriented Rock.

Whatever it stands for, it's just like any other genre; some good, some bad. BTW, it is technically Album Oriented Rock, or "the stuff they play on FM radio".
I like my rock to at least have a semblence of balls to it, though.
That's the main difference between the "AOR" of the 70's and the 80's; in the 70's radio rock was Zep, Deep Purple, Nugent, Bad Company, Pat Travers, Molly Hatchet, etc. By the time the 80's came around you had stuff like Loverboy, Paradise Theater Styx, REO Speedwagon, Foreigner, etc...
in short, rock was becoming more and more castrated.
And that's incidentally the main difference between 78-82 era VH and anything after that.

This man speaks the truth, as per usual. Rock music basically sucked in the 80s but in the 70s it was, for the most part, genius.

Calling AOR watered down is like calling a well crafted 60 proof vodka watered down because it doesn't have 80 proof like cheap aristocrat for 8 dollars a litre.

errr... o.k.

I would have been more apt to compare Van Hagar to a bottle of Bartles & James Wine cooler, but whatever.

And obviously not all AOR is "watered down"... though nobody said it was, in the first place. I believe I stated that AOR from the eighties was sackless, as opposed to the AOR of the seventies, which was awesome.

See, some people actually prefer (I know, it's damn shocking! I mean, can you imagine!?!) their rock a little more on the hard side.
You don't and that's fine. No need to justify it.

Thank you, kind sir.
70's rock was great.

70s rock didn't turn into 80s rock .. it turned into Hair Metal ;)

Or at least that's where the "balls" went on the radio.

Same thing here, i like Zep, Deep Purple, Molly Hatchet, Nugent and i ALSO like Foreigner, Survivor, Journey, Giant and Bad English.

Hey, I'm not knocking it, (well maybe a little, haha), it's just not much to my taste.
As for VH, I was dissapointed when they took a more pop-like approach, to say the least.

But, like I stated earlier, I can see the appeal; it's lighthearted, fun feel good music.
Still... the first VH album is a mastrepiece of seismic proportions, and the next three or four albums were almost as good.

I just don't think hardness = measure of quality under any circumstances.

I always thought most 70's hard rock was very boring, safe, sounded largely the same and i don't know, it was all so vanilla. Even the bands that got much better like REO speedwagon didn't have all that much to say. I think it comes down to being only a handful of producers and clones of those same guys insisting on a certain kind of thing. Once Boston came out, Tom didn't have to play by the rules because he was producing his own albums. After that, dare I say, I think everyone kind of ran with Boston's highly polished approach.

A matter of taste.

Boston's debut is aces, though.