Fair Warning (Van Halen album)
1981 studio album by Van Halen
Fair Warning is the fourth studio album by American rock band Van Halen. Released on April 29, 1981, by Warner Bros. Records, the album peaked at number 5 on the Billboard 200, while the single "So This Is Love?" failed to reach Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 110 on the Bubbling-Under list. The album sold more than two million copies in the United States, but was still the band's slowest-selling album of the David Lee Roth era. Despite the album's commercially disappointing sales, Fair Warning was met with mostly positive reviews from critics. It was listed by Esquire as one of the "75 Albums Every Man Should Own".
Packaging
The album's cover artwork features (in parts differently composed) details from The Maze, a painting by Canadian artist William Kurelek, which depicts his tortured youth.
The album's cover artwork is accompanied by an insert of a black-and-white portrait of the members of the band, in addition to another black-and-white photo of an exterior wall featuring cracked windows and a lyric from the album's opening song "Mean Street" in handwritten graffiti. This second photo was taken by famed rock photographer Neil Zlozower.
Critical reception
The Village Voice's Robert Christgau rated Fair Warning a B−, signifying "a competent or mildly interesting record usually featuring at least three worthwhile cuts." It featured "not just Eddie's latest sound effects, but a few good jokes along with the mean ones and a rhythm section that can handle punk speed emotionally and technically." He also explained "at times Eddie could even be said to play an expressive – lyrical?
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Fair Warning (Van Halen album)” as 1981 studio album by Van Halen. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1981 studio album by Van Halen. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q649585. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fair Warning (Van Halen album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.