"Right Now" is a rock song written by the group Van Halen for their album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. The song reflects on living for the moment and not being afraid of making a change. Vocalist Sammy Hagar has said that he was writing the lyrics to this song at the studio very late one night, and he heard Eddie Van Halen in an adjacent room working on a piano melody. Hagar said he suddenly realized that "we were writing the same song," so he walked into the room and began singing his words over Van Halen's music. A version of the melody appears in the 1984 movie The Wild Life which was scored by Eddie Van Halen.

Hagar says the lyrics for "Right Now" were the best he ever wrote for a Van Halen song. "I was tired of writing cheap sex songs," he recalled almost two decades later. "Eddie and I wanted to get serious and talk about world issues." Different edits of the video had been used in Van Halen's 2004 tour to make more explicitly political statements in later years.

The music video (directed by Mark Fenske and produced by Carolyn Beug) reflected on events that were occurring at the time, both within the band and social issues in the world around them. It used big block letters to display sentences such as "Right now, people are having unprotected sex" and "Right now, someone is working too hard for minimum wage", to describe the footage in the background. This concept was used previously in videos like Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise".

Hagar was initially opposed to the video's concept when it was first explained to him. He stated: "People ain't even going to be listening to what I'm saying because they'll be reading these subtitles". Despite Warner chairman Mo Ostin phoning him stating that it would be the biggest music video in the group's career, he was still so angry that he disappeared to South Carolina for a week with his then-girlfriend.

During the actual filming, he contracted pneumonia and was suffering from a fever, which intensified his anger over the video. Fenske says he did not notice, but allows that he was nervous and busy since it was the first video he had directed and he had many other things to pay attention to. According to Hagar, the scene where he folds his arms and refuses to sing, and the end of the video where he slams the dressing room door were not staged - he was genuinely angry.

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Wikipedia