"Dancing With Myself" by Billy Idol

Just thinking about this song gets your toe a-tappin' and your head a-bobbin'; it has that perfect blend of mellow reflection and defiant rockin' to suit almost any mood. It's a song about being so far into self-pity that you're past it, suddenly happy to bop around despite being a pathetic wallflower and make your own fun. Or masturbate. It might be about masturbation.

(I still remember my junior high health teacher singing and dancing around the room to "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Even I knew what that one was about, and he didn't? Maybe as our health teacher he was giving us some kind of secret message, the kind of message that got Joycelyn Elders booted from the Surgeon General's office (she wanted to "ask the world to dance", too). Hmmm, I hadn't thought of this. Stealth teaching in a Christian Right-dominated society.)

I read an interview with Billy Idol in his heyday, and he said that he has no problem with people who laugh at his punk posturing -- that he welcomes it, in fact, as long as they're open to his music. I can believe that a man with that perspective could write a song as matter-of-factly great as this one.

My friend Killian has a theory that songs with "la la la" sections automatically might be great. This song's excellent "oh oh oh-oh" bits bear that out, along with its perfectly-measured tempo changes and Idol's brilliant performance. He tells the story of the song from smooth to snarl to "scat" (what one set of lyrics I found on the internet hilariously called his oh oh oh-ohs) to scream with perfect ease.

Dude put toothpaste in his hair, but he could sing.