Rebel Yell
Billy Idol
1983
Ladies and gentlemen, we have survived. The title track is right there at the beginning, and its chorus is one of the crustiest, more cringeworthy songs of the entire decade of the 1980s, and it doesn't play better in an album context. I don't have any evidence in the memory banks as to why I recoil at the sound of Idol singing "more, more, more." I think it has something to do with TV commercials leaning on it too heavily as a certified "1980s sound." Google says that Bank of America used it most recently. No good music has ever soundtracked a fucking bank commercial. I'd typically say that this is not Billy Idol's fault, but Google is also telling me that Billy Idol himself was in the commercial. I also saw a headline literally just yesterday that Idol was featured in a trailer or ad spot or something for some comedian who is infamous for making jokes about domestic violence... I'm just going to go ahead and assume that Billy Idol is collecting paychecks, regardless of what the offers actually are. That doesn't make him a bad person. Doesn't make him a good person either. And it doesn't really affect the music on Rebel Yell, I don't know why I'm still typing about it.
Okay, so, Rebel Yell. Billy Idol's second album. The first one, a self-titled debut from the previous year, is the one that features "Dancing with Myself" and "White Wedding." Those, along with this album's title track, were apparently on MTV all the time. That is how you became a popular rock musician in the 1980s—MTV knighted you, basically. I love "Dancing with Myself" and I wasn't alive during Idol's true commercial peak, so I don't really have an opinion about his stature as a known '80s entity. I don't really know anything about this guy at all. E.g. when he popped up on that Miley Cyrus album, my reaction was more "I know that name" than anything else. I recognize the voice, I recognize the hits. E.g. I saw the title of this album and said to myself "oh fuck I hope that's not the 'more more more' song." And it was, and we survived, but that just goes to show that this is one of those artists whose popular work I know without really knowing I know. That's what A Year of Blind Spots is for. Here we are.
Tracks 4 and 5, "Blue Highway" and "Flesh for Fantasy" respectively, give you a pretty good back-to-back example of what to expect out of Idol here (and I assume on many other of his albums). "Blue Highway" is an upbeat guitar rocker with a fat backbeat. My favorite musical moment on the whole album is when he sings, possibly an ad lib, "Quaaludes and red wine for love / Yes, there's a time, a time for love." And then "Flesh for Fantasy" is this dark, slinky thing, all high synths and falsetto. The songs don't sound like each other, but they both sound like they came from the 1980s. Because they did. That's what we do for rock music from this era, we say "that sounds like the '80s," because it's a surprisingly good shorthand. Everyone knows what you mean.
No duds on Rebel Yell, besides the chorus of "Rebel Yell" (and even then, the verses are totally fine). Which makes me wonder why Billy Idol doesn't feel like he was ever an A-tier pop star. What I'm trying to say is, from my perspective (i.e. the perspective of a fucking moron), Billy Idol has always felt like a leftover from a previous era, despite the fact that he's made music semi-regularly over the past 40+ years. It's probably just a simple matter of his biggest hits coming in the '80s, and his stature falling steadily on parallel tracks as MTV's descent from the pop culture consciousness. Though you can't discount the possibility that his 1990 motorcycle accident that broke his career as messily as it broke his leg. Think about it: you're a huge artist in the '80s, the new decade starts and you're forced for health reasons to remove yourself from the public eye, and by the time you come back, the '80s are over with both literally and figuratively, and aren't coming back on the nostalgia cycle for another decade at least. So you're stuck in the past.
None of this is criticism on my part, by the way. I love this style of music, specifically the new wave music that Idol was spearheading with artists like Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, Bowie, and so on. It's a hard-rock strain of new wave, but still of a very specific era. I just find it a bit weird that it's taken me until the fifth year of moving through these Blind Spots to finally get to a Billy Idol album. Like, there has to be a reason, right? Did I really just need to hear "Dancing with Myself" for the 1500th time for it to click that this might be an artist I want in my life? Is it a matter of distancing myself from his for-profit 2020s pursuits? Is it a matter of missing the boat when he was doing his thing before I was born? All of the above? Doesn't matter. If you need your daily fix of the '80s, this is today's.
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