10 Worst Genre Switches In Rock Music History
7. Cyberpunk - Billy Idol
If you were known to be a superstar in the '80s, the start of the next decade was a good reason to start scrambling. With the alternative revolution hot on your tail, some of the greatest bands of the last decade had to work fast to reinvent themselves into something that didn't seem as dated anymore. Though people like U2 managed to pull it off with an album like Achtung Baby, Billy Idol took a swing at rave music becoming the hot new sound of rock in 1992.
Complete with some of the most confusing videos of his career, Cyberpunk is definitely a different look for the punk rocker who made Dancing with Myself, going for something that fit somewhere between dance rock and the emerging sounds of electronic music coming down the pipeline. As if to give himself some cred, Idol even took a few cues from science fiction books like Neuromancer, which hits an odd note when it's coming out of the hard rock starlet of MTV.
This wasn't a bad idea from skin to core though. If Billy had decided to wait out the rest of the decade for a little bit, this odd mix of electronic rock may have been able to fit right in with bands like The Prodigy and Nine Inch Nails. In hindsight though, we will always have to remember him at his most genetically modified and impossibly cringy moment.