Guitar Solo #1 - "Rebel Yell" by Billy Idol

So here's my new blog, where I'll be analyzing a guitar solo every day, or almost every day - telling you what makes a solo good, or bad, or prophetic, or just face-melting. Today we'll start with the guitar solo in Billy Idol's ode to sexual excess, "Rebel Yell" (runs in video from 2:31-2:54). This solo seems like a good place to start as it weds two disparate elements in guitar soloing: joining fretboard shredding with emotive noise techniques.

See, there are guitar soloists like Eddie Van Halen: virtuosic spazzes, who play very simple fretboard patterns incredibly fast. Generally their solos lack the harmonic content of a player like Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, whose solos are often memorable enough that they can be sung note for note.  These solos are burning with intensity, and dexterity, but the soul, the emotional content of the solo is sometimes absent, or, in some cases, emotionally stunted. On the other hand you have guys like Thurston Moore and Robert Fripp who create walls of sound with unorthodox playing techniques, and what makes these guys good is that even their most out, skronking solo, is still laden with emotion, passion.

In Steve Steven's solo from "Rebel Yell" we hear the spazzing fretboard wizardry, but, and this is what makes the solo kick ass for me, there are these intense emotional moments in the solo created by unorthodox playing techniques. At 2:41 and 2:53 we get some whammy bar action - I heard one of the guys in Night Ranger call it a "wang bar" which is a better name for it than I could ever come up with. Anyway these wang bar dives are not only musical (while still being spazzy); they're also passionate and communicative as musical elements. Idol wisely uses these dives as musical transitions dynamically from wall of sound to soloed drum fills.

"Rebel Yell" is a classic radio rock song, turning up on countless oldies stations. But, if you look closely, you can see the way the song reveals the conditions of late capitalism, in which the media-saturated populace becomes a kind of over-stimulated nymphet aroused to such a state of ecstasy and desire that she can only articulate her desire for "more, more, more" as she writhes seductively on the floor. She is desire personified, and, in America. in late capitalism, desire is sacred.