Sometimes while I wander around on the World Wide Web, I am just struck by something I see, even though it’s not about politics or economics or America or the world.
In Oscar Wilde’s book, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous Gray doesn’t age, but his portrait, concealed in the attic, not only shows his age, it shows his sins as well. Unlike the fictional Gray, however, as we grow old, unless you get plastic surgery, our faces eventually show our character — what kind of person you are.
This is one of those posts.
Would you believe that the man in the photo below ↓
. . . looks like this, 29 years later? ↓
The two pics above are both images of Billy Idol (birth name William Broad), an English punk rocker.
The first photo was taken in 1985 when Idol was 30 years old, for a cover story in Rolling Stone magazine. The second photo was taken in 2014 when Idol was 59 years old. Today is his 60th birthday.
It’s not just the aging. It’s the evil demonic visage, shown vividly in another pic of Idol in 2014:
Wikipedia says Idol, born in 1955, has two children with two women — a son with Perri Lister; a daughter with Linda Mathis.
Idol is a drug addict. He claims to have first smoked marijuana at the age of 12, and took acid at the age of 13. In 1994, he collapsed outside a Los Angeles nightclub due to an overdose on a drug called GHB, which was a legal drug at the time, mainly used by weight-lifters. Idol claims that although he has not completely renounced drug use, he now has his habit under control.
In 2005, Idol released an album, his 6th, called “Devil’s Playground” that reached No. 46 on the Billboard 200. The album’s cover song is “Plastic Jesus”. Other songs on the album include “Monster,” “Evil Eye,” Body Snatcher,” “Stranger in My Skin” and “Man in the Kill Box”. Here are the lyrics of the blasphemous “Plastic Jesus”:
I don’t care if it
Rains or freezes
As long as I’ve got my
Plastic Jesus
Ridin’ on the dashboard
Of my carThrough my trials
And tribulations
And my travels
Through the nation
With my plastic Jesus
I’ll go far . . . .An if I weave around at night
Policemen think I’m very tight
They never find my bottle
Though they ask‘Cos plastic Jesus shelters me
For his head comes off you see
He’s hollow and I use him like a flaskWoa Woa Woa
Save me
I don’t care if it’s dark or scary
Long as I got magnetic Mary
Ridin’ on the dashboard of my car . . . .When I’m goin’ fornicatin’
I’ve got my ceramic Satan
Sittin’ on the dashboard of my car
Women know I’m on the level
Thanks to the wide-eyed stoneware devil
Sneerin’ from the dashboard of my car
~Eowyn
