Obscure Album Review: Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk

He really should have asked Giger to do the album cover.

Today we take a look at one of Billy Idol’s most obscure albums (the other being his Christmas album… yes… he made one). But was it actually good? Click “Read More for the full review! Like the last Obscure Album Review it got a lot of heat, this time by both Idol fans and fans of the cyberpunk genre. Honestly this was quite an independent effort in his case, he made it at his friends house on his Mac… its pretty ballsy to pull a stunt like that when you are revered as a mainstream artist, its like if Bruno Mars made a black metal album about Disney movies in his dentist’s basement. So this dramatic step of course ended in complete critique and financial failure… but it was a pretty badass album. Billy wanted to create a concept album that would appeal to the “cyberpunk” genre fandom since that’s what he was really interested in and what he created was essentially a cyberpunk story: hackers/underdogs vs megacorperations/evil government etc.Nothing more, nothing less. It derives a lot from cyberpunk novels and films so I really don’t see the problem other than it can come out as rather poser-esque, which is understandable, an 80’s idol doing an album themed against commercialism… but then again Max Headroom was against commercialism and he ended up selling a lot of Coca-Cola. Speaking of Max Headroom:

Wh-wh-white Wed-ed-ed-ing

Whatever the case, it has several tracks and has no problem giving you a variety of sounds, its pure 90s techno/electronica/industrial/etc and for me it doesn’t disappoint, it pays quite a bit of obvious homage to William Gibson despite Gibson’s distaste for the album and comes off rather corny in his “manifesto” intro, fillers and outro but it’s freaking entertaining. For me it’s like an awesome 90’s b-movie mixed with Hardware and Akira, now super fans of those movies would scream “HERESY” at me and I understand why… but who cares. Now if there’s one thing this album is legendary for aside from being hated… it was one of the precursors to music on the internet… yes… this was one of the first instances of an album being promoted online and if there’s anything that should be taken from this album that should be it.

Oh wow… he did kinda over do it.

Now the release of this album included a special floppy disk filled with special features due to the fact that this was before most albums has built in special features, it also added to the “cyber” aspect of it all and with that he also released a “Shockumentery”. He tried to cyberpunk the hell out of this album. The album itself is quite inciting and it is one I would suggest out of curiosity to anyone who is an obscure-aholic. It tells a story about a society rising up against its government and does it rather well, each track has a different feel and there’s even an awesome music video for the album’s single “Shock To The System” that is very reminiscent of Tetsuo: The Iron Man another cyberpunk film from Japan. Beware: its ironically on Vevo.

So overall I give it:

An 8/10 for personal originality and creativity.

And a 6/10 for the actual music and replay value.

It ain’t bad folks, pick it up.

Or CyberBilly will destroy you!!