10 Albums That Should Have Never Gotten Big
6. Diver Down - Van Halen
A lot of fairweather music fans tend to just put music in either a good or bad category and just leave it at that. Even though there have been some real dogs throughout the tenure of the charts, nothing is that set in stone, with most of the charts being populated by something that's just fair. If there was one album that hurts just a bit more though, it's ones that are just completely unnecessary.
During Van Halen's impeccable run in the late '70s and early '80s, the kings of hair metal could barely find time to breathe in the shuffle. Ever since their debut, the band were on what seemed like an endless loop of an album and a tour before finally deciding to take a break before going into record 1984. Though they seemed to smooth things over with a cover of Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman to keep fans satisfied, the label twisted their arm even more and made them fill out an album of material in the meantime.
The result turned into Diver Down, which stands more as a collection of odds and ends than a proper Van Halen album, not helped by the fact that almost half of the album is populated by cover songs. This kind of throwaway thing comes and goes throughout rock history, but it feels all the more disheartening seeing one of the kings of rock doing it.