Nov 03 2008
A Strange Wake Up Call Rouses P and F Back into Action….Barry O Beats the Drums of War….Orgasmic Copy Editing Gone Awry…..A Vote for Nader is the Only Vote for True Democracy
“Face to face
And back to back
You see and feel
My sex attack”
–Billy Idol
When he was 10, Billy Idol joined the Cub Scouts. He wasn’t Billy Idol then, he was William Michael Albert Broad and he was living a rather unremarkable existence in Goring, England. He went to school, played sports, climbed trees, went to the theater, attended church, did the dishes, hung out with his mates and engaged in the normal activities of a 10-year-old boy. For this reason, it wasn’t much of a surprise that when most of his peers joined the St. Mary’s Cub Scouts, Billy did, too.
But unlike his friends, Billy’s career as a Cub Scout was short-lived. And the reason he was asked to leave the chapter—a mere 3 months after he joined—forecasted a destiny that could not be properly groomed by tying square knots and building tepees. Sure, Billy had already displayed a bit of a wild streak, but when he was caught by his scoutmaster feeling up a girl five years his senior behind a hotdog stand in the midst of a soapbox derby, it became abundantly clear that he had talents far beyond whittling. He was pure sex, a budding cocksman of epic promise, and such a threat to the moral integrity of the Cub Scouts that his presence could no longer be tolerated.
Yes, in October of 1965, William Albert Broad was given the boot by the St. Mary’s Cub Scouts. Months later, a teacher would write “Billy is idle,” on one of his school papers, in reference to Billy’s apparent disinterest in school. Ten years later, Billy would officially adopt the stage name Billy Idol during the formation of the Sex Pistols’ inspired punk band Generation X. Five years later, in 1984, he’d release his first solo album, Billy Idol, and armed with killer hair, a closet full of leather and an insatiable libido, he’d become a full-blown glam-rockstar and one of the earliest sex symbols of the burgeoning network MTV.
Since then, Billy’s almost died twice—first due to a motorcycle accident and then a mammoth overdose of GHB—but fate tends to smile on the hypersexual and Mr. Idol is still alive and thrusting today. In fact, he released Devil’s Playground, his first album in ten years, in 2005, and has been touring throughout 2008 in support of it.
It was three days ago—the morning after his Halloween show in Prague—that Billy’s agent, Leonard Washington, rang the central offices here at Politics and Funk.com. To be honest, the editorial staff was extremely hung over, and we only answered the phone as an alternative to breaking it into pieces to stop the ringing. But regardless of how haggard we may have felt at the moment, Leonard Washington sounded much worse.
He told us that he had been up throughout the night trying to prevent Billy from being…..Billy. According to Washington, age has done little to quell Idol’s appetite for drink and women, and he had crashed a Halloween party the night before, downing a handle of Maker’s Mark whiskey and fornicating with a corset-clad college student in an attic. At the peak of his intoxication—minutes before he did a back-flip into a keg stand—Idol had confided in Washington that he was a huge fan of Politics and Funk and that he considered it the supreme avenue for online political discourse. He then proclaimed that the media’s coverage of the 2008 election had sickened him and that he felt a burning desire to set the American public straight on a few things before they stroll to the polls like “bloody fucking sheep” on Election Day.
“So, what does this have to do with us?” Chief Editor Jamal Nesbit finally barked into the phone.
“Well, Billy wants to endorse, and he wants to do it on P and F,” Washington replied.
“No way, no guest writers and no endorsements, those are the core principles of P and F. Call The New York Times, they’re lusting for more Obama endorsements.”
“He’s not voting for Obama.”
“What, you’re telling me Idol digs the GOP? Fuck, what kind of world is this?”
“No, not McCain either.”
“Oh, so he wants to write in Ron Paul’s name?”
“Wrong again.”
“Well, then, who?”
“Idol isn’t a shill for the two-party system. He’s voting for Nader. He wants 600 words and if you don’t give it to him he’s vowed to de-flower the daughters of your entire staff.”
“Ha, he’ll be in his seventies by the time they’re of age, he won’t even be able to get it up.”
There was a pause on the line and a scream from somewhere distant. Washington sounded confused and frazzled, like the master of a vicious albino pit-bull whose thirst for the mailman could not be denied. Nesbit had transferred the call to speaker phone, and the brainchild of P and F sat in a crude semi-circle perplexed at the commotion. To be honest, we didn’t have a clue what was going on. But then, a low, staccato humming boomed through the phone.
“It’s a bass-line,” Nesbit said.
It was. Billy proceeded to serenade us with an a capella version of his 1984 hit, “White Wedding.” It was a robust performance and we were all pretty impressed, including the sole female member of the P and F team, copyeditor Laura Lane Welch, who flung herself on top of the speaker phone. Her eyes were glazed over and her body was convulsing in delight.
“What’s happening,” Nesbit asked.
“That my friend, is the female orgasm,” Head Editor Eli Percepied said.
He was right.
It is hard to strong-arm an independent webzine with no real journalistic motivation except the exercise of ego, but Billy Idol did just that. By sending Welch into fits of erotic bliss, he made it apparent that his threat of plundering our first-borns weren’t idle ones. We were faced with a grim choice, and to be honest, an easy one.
So without further adieu, we present to you the presidential endorsement of Billy Idol. And if the prose seems unedited, well, that’s because our copywriter couldn’t work on this piece without being sent into spates of sexual exhilaration, so we decided to just publish it raw. Besides, I think Billy prefers it that way.