Come back to the five-and-dime, Billy Idol.

I was just sitting here listening to my Rebel Yell CD, which I got sometime back. One of the things I've been doing since getting a CD player a decade or so ago is buying my favorite tapes on CD. I still have a lot of my tapes from high school and college, but let's face it, they don't sound as good as the CD. Anyway, I'm sitting here listening to Rebel Yell and one of the remakes towards the end of the album comes on and I notice that they've got the vocal track playing so low, you can barely hear it. Anyway, curious about this, I make various adjustments to my iTunes equalizer until I can hear the vocal better, and I immediately understand why it was so low to begin with: The singing sucks major donkey dicks. I don't know when they did these remakes, and they probably did it to add to the album when it was released on CD, but it stinks. Now maybe Billy Idol never could sing. I really don't know, but even if he was this bad in the '80's, why weren't they using the sound engineers from those old albums for these new songs? You couldn't tell on the old albums that Billy's vocal talents might be lacking. You sure can on those extra songs, though. He can't hit the high notes. He's not singing the right words. He sounds like he's either drunk or on major psychotropic medication. So the question that comes to mind is why even bother? Why not just chalk up the cost of studio time to lessons learned and forget the experiment entirely? Why did they still think it was worth putting the remakes on the album? I mean, really, it's embarrassing for Billy. Why not let the world fantasize about what you used to be rather than beating them over the head with the sorry stick that is your reality? It made me sad to listen to them because I used to do a lot of fantasizing about Billy Idol when I was a teenager. In fact, one of my goals in life was to have sex with him. Obviously, that never happened. But, damn, listening to his tired, worn-out voice and imagining the skinny 50-year-old body behind it makes me glad it never happened. Actually, Billy's not looking that bad considering his somewhat advanced age, hard-living rock and roll life, motorcyle crashes and slavish dedication to one hairstyle. I'd probably still do him...if I was drunk...and the lights in the club were really dark so he still looked good, from a distance...and I was fantasizing about Sting.