In that context, Generation X is a vital expression of punk’s ethos. The guitars sound metal-plated, Idol’s voice soars and sneers, and the melodies hit like bricks to the forehead. The shouty “Youth Youth Youth” is a manifesto on teenage independence built around soccer chants and power chords (“Don’t wanna spend my life savin’ up for things/I don’t wanna have what a steady job brings”). On “One Hundred Punks,” Idol takes the rush of a subculture taking over the city and distills it down to “a hundred good mates you know you can trust.”
The best song on Generation X went even further, a punk ballad about teenage sex, football violence, and the thrill of having a city as your playground. “Kiss Me Deadly” was inspired in part by Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland.” It’s a four-and-a-half-minute mini-epic exploring the hormone rush and the urgency of youth, rather than just expecting distorted guitars to make it self-evident. It opens with Idol singing almost plaintively over Andrews’ clean guitar about a rockabilly show. A switchblade glimmers, two kids fall in love, and the ecstasy is the same both times. There’s a riot on the terraces at Fulham Football Club’s Craven Cottage, where a “battle is won and lost.” A thousand black and white bar scarves fly, two kids discover sex in a basement room, and heroin is just another kick worth trying on a day skipping school, “having fun in South-West Six.”
Released on Chrysalis Records, Generation X climbed into the UK Top 40, giving Idol more chances to mime on the BBC. Critics in America—who’d had the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and a thriving “new wave” scene for an extra half-decade—were kinder than the NME had been back home. In a positive review at Trouser Press, Ira Robbins argued, “Punk wasn’t (and isn’t) what Billy Idol and band are about. Basically, they’re a powerful teeny band… innocuous rockers bringing punk down to the level where a ten-year-old can understand it.” Idol himself would have been happy with that. “It’s great to get into magazines and have kids buy our records rather than the Bay City Rollers or any of that factory-produced music which is trash,” he told Sounds that spring after Generation X was released. “You reach an audience you might not otherwise reach—get ’em while they’re young—before they leave school and fuck up.”
However that’s not how Generation X turned kids away from trash. The band released two more albums before breaking up. 1979’s Valley of the Dolls more explicitly borrowed from glam and rock’n’roll, and 1981’s Kiss Me Deadly was more ambitious structurally and sonically, belonging more to the burgeoning new wave scene that would explode over the next half-decade. By then, Idol was already mentally checked out, ready to strike out on his own, and later that year, he moved to New York and released his first EP as a solo artist. The back half of the EP comprised two songs from those early Gen X demos, “Untouchables” and “Dancing with Myself,” both sanded down, relacquered, and prepared for a mass market. When MTV launched that August, the pretty boy with the hair was in his element, and his early singles practically played on repeat. He’s still touring. He’s sold roughly 40 million records. One of his biggest songs, “Rebel Yell,” is less about rebelling than it is about bourbon and fucking. If you haven’t seen the new documentary on his life, Billy Idol Should Be Dead, you might have seen him on adverts selling AI platforms alongside Travis Barker and Gwen Stefani.
But Generation X took on a life of its own. It was one of the first punk albums Ian MacKaye heard, one of Henry Rollins’ favorite albums ever, and a touchstone for the East Bay punk scene that spat up Green Day. Shorn of all its context, the accusations of being too nice or too clean or too posed, Generation X traveled in its purest form: an album about a fleeting feeling of immortality, running around town with a hundred of your friends, fucking and fighting and having fun.
