Remembering Billy Idol's "Flesh for Fantasy"
Welcome to a new, possibly recurring, column from The Typing Monkey in which we pick a hit single from the past to dissect, inspect, discuss and analyze. Specifically, we will seek out the hits that sound especially odd to modern ears -- songs that are frozen in time, trapped by the eras that created them. Sometimes these songs became hits despite the standards and expectations of the time. All of them sound, to today's listener, singularly absurd.
Song: "Flesh for Fantasy"
Artist: Billy Idol
Released: 1984
Label: Chrysalis
Highest chart position on Billboard's "Hot 100": 29
Parents in a not-too-distant future may want to let their children know what 1980s pop radio sounded like. This song from the middle of Billy Idol's early '80s winning streak is an ideal example. Many of the wonders and embarrassments of the weird world of Top 40 music from that decade are tidily arranged within the four-and-a-half minutes of "Flesh for Fantasy."
The guitar, bass and drums are so fussed over that even the distortion and other effects sound clean. Not sterile, necessarily, but somebody spent a lot of money on cutting-edge studio gear, and some sound engineer used it a little too well. As an associate of The Typing Monkey put it: "You can just see them in the studio arguing over the synthesized handclaps and bitching how it can sound like Howard Jones no matter what."
Anybody who, at the time, may've held on to a whispy thread of hope that Billy Idol would set aside his glossy Los Angeles pop-rock imitation of punk-rock toughery and return to fronting the English glam/pop/punk outfit Generation X likely let that hope drift away upon hearing "Flesh."
After a short instrumental opening, where it's impossible to tell if the drums are electronic or human, Idol coos in his best bedroom baritone, asking us if we "like good music" and if we "like to dance" then quickly answering for us in the affirmative. He switches from lothario to detached analyst throughout, seducing the listener then stepping back to offer half-finished observations about human behavior.
At least it seems that way. Only Billy knows exactly what these words mean.
The sneer/snarl that made Idol famous arrives just in time for the chorus, which at first recalls Debbie Harry's opening lines from "Rapture" ("Face to face / And back to back") then unleashes this puzzling phrase: "You see and feel / My sex attack."
Begging pardon? What's a "sex attack"? Again, only Billy Idol knows. Sure the listener can speculate, and taken out of context it's more than a little bit off-putting, sounding as if it was lifted from a scandalous tabloid headline.
But then the second half of the chorus comes in and Idol barks the song title, which aces a hat trick by being titillating, ambiguous and completely without substance. That is, it's the kind of phrase that hit songwriters dream about -- it fits in a chorus, sounds dangerous and suggestive, and as a song title, it flashes in the dark like a neon sign.
To the teenage ears that made "Flesh for Fantasy" a hit, the song is clearly about "sex" in the most generic, wildly misunderstood way that adolescent brains can imagine. The music dances noncommittally between the brooding eroticism of goth, pop-metal theatrics, and British synthesized dance music. Now read those previous two sentences again and try to argue that "Flesh" could not have been a hit song in the '80s.
Is it giving Billy Idol and his co-writer/guitarist Steve Stevens too much credit to wonder if there's subtext to the song? These two wrote "Rebel Yell", the title track to the album from which "Flesh" and a subsequent hit "Eyes Without a Face" came. The song "Rebel Yell" is pure, unadulterated PG naughtiness -- a party tune made to be both blatant and coy.
Hold on -- isn't that just what we said about "Flesh for Fantasy"? Hmm.
Listeners too young to have heard "Flesh for Fantasy" in regular rotation will laugh at it and wonder just how much cocaine was dumped into the water supply during the Reagan administration. Those who lived it have only two choices: disavow its existence (and stand guilty of denying the past); or embrace this strange little monster as a product of its time.
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