Cyberpunk: Billy Idol

Hi Rover, thanks so much for the review! Hopefully we see many more music albums!

Nice one

I shall force myself to write something perfectly understandable for anyone using English about Fear Factory’s “Demanufacture” - THE industrial metal album

I like “Shock To The System”

He should have mixed in some dub, methinks.

Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk is definitely cyberpunk despite some of the songs not having strictly cyberpunk themes. Just look at them as Rockerboy love songs (a la Cyberpunk 2020). Also Shock to the System is one of his best hits, and like you said the music video is a perfect example of a cyberpunk video. Billy said in a lot of interviews at the time that he really felt the cyberpunk movement was really important and relevant and that’s why he made the album.

GREAT! Very nice review! I love Billy Idol. This album is very special!

I think Cyberpunk that Idol did is a great cd with great tunes. Each tells a story for the futuristic world in some way many awe and others pray not to be.

A the songs Love Labours On, its a bout love and in many books and movies love (the pure love) is gone or forbidden. I think this song tells the story that as a punker we do revolotion against the athourity and their diffrent way to controlle each and everyone of us.

Again Shangrila is a great tune too, of course we seek a place of focus and peace. As this world (or the futuristic) spins faster and afaster. Even for us its harder to follow, as the world slowly crumble (think of wastland) This peace we seek might be in the cyberspace, or just in a perfect point and moment.

Mother Dawn is yet anther of this tunes that shows the one that understood how far ye can go with technology.. there is one more abstract one more complexed that we may never ‘crack’ is Gaia. But the true punker takes this and combind it with the new harcore technology. Making the best thing for everyone as again athority just try to lift itself higer and higher up, keep distant with us on the ground so to say.

Well I could probly go on and on with alot, shrotly to say I think this cd is great. It gives a good feeling, lots of thoughts. For me this is a cyberpunk tunes each and everyone. For it takes up points and ideas from lots of books and movies.. be just small parts within them or the whole book or movie, but still its important as the writer or moviemaker do have their ideas and thoughts they want to share..

anways thanks mate to put this up.. and show the vidoes, gaw have i missed them

clearly people are missing the cyber inthe cyberpunk title. cyberpunk is not refering to the rpg, but to his status a a punk rocker and his cd which was one of the first enhanced cd,s to use for your pc so in my opinion the rpg is cool but this album has nothing to do with it

[…] represents, until Time Magazine’s cover article “Cyberpunk” in February 1993 or Billy Idol’s “Cyberpunk” CD in July 1993. That year, the term and the movement was no longer underground; It was now injected […]

I love this album. I love Billy Idol :*

This is a very good album, I’m enjoying it now. Still it must have disappointed BI fans when it come out in ‘93. I bought it in ‘94 because I was interested in CP and I liked a lot the Shock to The System song and videoclip, but it disappointed me as a whole album. But now, about 15 years later, the songs come from the shuffle of my iPod ad I can definitely say that this is a great album, I’m finally happy that I got it. I totally reassessed it.

Well as an old, long time Idol-Fan back in 93 this album was a bit strange to me……………on the other hand: Billy had the “BALLS” to do such an album: If you love or hate Billy Idol, there is one thing he never did: Copy himself and his music over and over again!!! If you listen to his 6 solo records not one of them sounds the same, and that is great! He always uses differend music styles (Rock, Punk, Diso, Blues, Techno, Pop etc) and mixed them together, to that special “Idol-Sound” To me Cyberpunk is 75% Cyberpunk and 25 % a Commercial-Record……..well it was never a commercial sucsess.

No Artist with a Punk, Rock, Pop-Backround or whatever came out with a album like Cyberpunk!!! This record may was ahed of it times, and i beleive if it would be released now it would be a huge hit!

Anyway i listen to this record right now, and it is a great pice of modern music! BILLY RULES!!!

i feel sorry for my badass-english!!!

I bought this album back when it came out and I made sure I picked the one that came with the special media disk. Back at that time, being in school and interested in computers and arts, all the new media grabbed my attention.

Man, I love this album and I think it’s one of his best. I’ve still got the disk and this is one CD that doesn’t get lent out. My kids even love the CD.

Typo says it best, though.

I give the last BI album, Devil’s Playground a hardy thumbs-up, too.

This album is, above all, a vanguard work. It was an honest attempt to translate into music the cyberpunk feeling. Maybe if he had done more research on the theme and worked with someone specially in the lyrics it would have been even better.

absolutly damn classic

This is interesting album.

Themes of this album reminds me of other band founded by former Generation X members, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and how they used some ‘cyberpunkish’ things in their works. (”There’s smart new art to robbin’ on the highway, that’s hackin’ up the banks an’ a shakin’ up the skyways. It’s a new ambition, it’s a brand new craze and I have to tell you boys that supercrime pays”)

However Billy takes things ways beyond in comparison to Sigues and I wonder how long he kept wondering cyberpunk theme before album got made.

Yeah, what IS it with Generation X members and cyberpunk? Did they stay in five star hotels reading Burning Chrome and Snow Crash, and watching Blade Runner instead of getting doped up to their eyeballs in parties?

Come on!! this was a pretty poor review in a way, I wasn’t impressed by how you reviewed it and what you measured each song by. You reviewed it like someone with autism: “This isn’t cyberpunk” or “I tried really hard, but I can’t see the link with CP!”, you’re not actually a robot, throw away your anally-bound logic: you are a colorful human being!! if only you could have made the links with the real world, instead of your ideal of cyberpunk clouding your judgement, this would have been a better review.
It was like you are now in a state where only extreme cyberpunk is the norm, like a heroin addict, your life has sunk to that level, that you are in a mental high where anything slightly below your imaginary line drains you or is unsatisfactory. The album is called CYBERPUNK, that is the context of every song in the album, and it shows, even in ‘love labours on’, it’s cyberpunk, definitely, it’s just a slower jamming pace.
As a human being we all need different levels of emotion and pace, we can’t always be in a constant state of radical-punk, full-speed-ahead, nitrous-oxide-injected-fire blood- we need balance, so that we can make sense of each side. Billy Idol knew this when he was making the album, he is a musician after all, and you can’t be a good musician if you don’t cater to both sides, that’s WHY there are those more serene songs: to cater along side the velocity of the extreme songs for our many wants and desires. I think this was a pretty bang on album, every track has its merits and after listening to the whole thing, you get a sense of the times and the swings and roundabouts of cyberpunk as a scene and a genre. I think it was really affective as he didn’t let down, he really went for this concept of CP and let it fly. I love it and personally if it’s not cyberpunk enough for you, you don’t get what cyberpunk is about really… Ok that’s a bit unfair, obviously you like cyberpunk, but you just need to widen your vision. Cyberpunk to me is about how everyone interprets it individually, but it IS life, and in this life there is a vast, unlimited spectrum of creative possibilities in the genre, as is in life in general. There is a mellow side to everything, a yin and a yang. You cant just shun it and pretend its not there, you gotta embrace it and understand it. So anything remotely cyberpunk is still cyberpunk, and it must be nurtured, not cast off like a leprosy-riddled toe.

“This video contains content from EMI, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”

How very cyberpunk…