Dancing With Myself

I distincly remember the video to this song, billy idol standing on the roof of a building in some sort of post-apocalyptic setting, he's just hopping around while these half-scary half-sexy women climb the building, reaching the top near the end of the song and then, well dancing.

I remember the video came out around the same time as Bruce Sprinsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" video and somewhere in the back of my head I get these two songs mixed up because of that.

Oh how I long for the days when MTV played music videos

Generation X, Billy Idol's pre-solo career punk band, were the first to perform the song. It was subsequently used by Billy as a solo track, and covered to death by a cornucopia of lame bands such as Blink 182, Green Day, Third Eye Blind, and terrible techno group The Boomtang Boys. It is much easier to find mpeg audio layer III versions of all these lame-ass covers than it is to find Generation X's or even Billy Idol's version. One would think that an mp3 labeled only as "Dancing With Myself.mp3" would be Billy Idol's...but noooooooooo. Stupid techno kids. I also found what is purportedly a version of the song done by Kids Incorporated, the Disney channel show about a kiddie pop group whose biggest problems were dancing and sibling rivalries that came on right after the Mickey Mouse Club show as I recall...but I'm far too frightened to download it. I mean...what if it really IS them? Do I want to hear a bunch of kids singing about masturbation? Granted, the song could conceivably have a clean interpretation, dancing with oneself non-euphemistically is a lot of fun, and it's the only way fat guys like me can dance at all without being hopelessly embarrassed ("There's nothing to lose/And there's nothing to prove.") But the line "Well, I wait so long for my love vibration" kind of thrusts it into the realm of the dirty.

And I think the line, at least in the Generation X and Billy Idol versions, is "If I had a chance I'd ask the world to dance and not be dancing with myself"...yeah, that's dirty and horny. Billy's gonna sweat.

The Generation X version is number 256 on CFNY's Top 1002 New Rock Songs of all-time...though it deserves better.