I had an amazing wrong-key/flipped-beat/out-of-context hearing experience yesterday as the radio morphed out of dream-protoplasm into the solo from "Everybody Wants Some!!", my favorite passage in all of Van Halen: a simple melody, then that melody an octave higher. Whether or not you like them, I think we can agree that Van Halen has no musical peers; they outclass all. I also think they represent the pinnacle of modernism in rock music, though this thesis, I have found, does not have universal intuitive appeal. When challenged to defend this view, or at least give it some content, I could say only "seems true." Sketches of an argument that tries a little harder: novel experiences of time and space, reflecting those made possible by new technologies of media and transportation; anti-romantic, anti-sentimental detachment; primitivist incorporation of African art; futurist extension of the perceptual body; privileging of phenomena of motion and speed; populist avant-gardism; fascist fusion of athletics and aesthetics; self-identification as musical art; insistence on purity of medium; aestheticization of the alienation and aggression and mechanization inherent to urban, industrial experience; mastery as a value; genius as a value; content composed of experiences of form, with no regard for classical unities; responsibility to nothing outside the music.