Here’s a free one for all you freeloaders!
Transcript
It’s Friday, May 8, 2026. I’m allegedly Jim Treacher. And I have just gained a whole new appreciation for Billy Idol.
That’s right, I said it: Billy Idol. This guy’s been misunderstood for decades, and I’m gonna tell you why.
The other day I watched a really, really great documentary you might have heard about: Billy Idol Should Be Dead. Which is about… Billy Idol and why he should be dead. Truth in advertising.
It’s an authorized biography. He’s in it, present day, talking about all the crazy stuff he did in the ‘80s. What he can remember of it…
Now, I knew some stuff about him before I saw this movie. I knew he was all over MTV. I knew all his hits. I knew that before he came to America, he was in a British punk band in the ‘70s called Generation X. Way before my generation took that name for ourselves. He was one of the original London punks. He loved the Sex Pistols and lived by their example. And he ended up leapfrogging them.
And I knew he liked to party. He was a rock star, after all. Still is.
But I had no idea he almost died in the ‘80s.
In 1984, at the height of his fame, he overdosed on heroin, to the point where he turned blue. He had snorted too much heroin. I guess he thought he’d be okay as long as he didn’t inject it. And he almost died. Somehow he managed to keep it out of the papers. Nobody knew about it until he told everybody, decades later.
And he kept going. He kept making hits. He kept making money for a lot of people. And he kept doing a lot of drugs.
In the movie, they use animated sequences, kind of anime-ish cartoons, to depict his various drug escapades. And it’s interspersed with interview footage from the ‘80s, where you can see him kind of deteriorate. You can see, his whole demeanor starts to change. He still has that Billy Idol wit and charm, but he becomes more and more subdued as he sinks deeper and deeper into this addiction.
Then in 1990, after a decade of rock-star excess, he was in a serious motorcycle accident and his leg got really messed up. His right leg. They kind of gloss over it in the movie, but he was drunk and on drugs, and he ran a stop sign and got hit by a car.
And his leg almost had to be amputated. They ended up putting a steel rod in it to hold it together. They show some of the pictures in the documentary, and it was really gruesome. (It reminded me of my accident, 16 years ago now.) And because of his lifestyle, he had such a high tolerance for painkillers that the doctor was like: “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Which brings me to the part that really interests me.
Billy Idol tells the story about being interviewed by a music journalist after the accident. And he had a muscle stimulator, electronic muscle stimulator, on his leg to prevent atrophy. When you’re laid up, you can’t move those muscles, and they start to wither, and it can really mess you up long-term. So they jolt your muscles to keep them going.
And this journalist saw the wires and stuff on his leg, and he said: “Hey, you’re a cyber-punk!”
And apparently, that was Billy Idol’s introduction to the term “cyberpunk.” Which is how he ended up making the album Cyberpunk.
Which was a huge career setback. It bombed. Critics hated it. Nobody bought it, in both senses. Nobody purchased the album, and nobody really believed Billy Idol was suddenly a sci-fi nerd.
I was one of those people. I remember when that album came out, I had read a number of cyberpunk novels. The science fiction genre. Which predicted a dystopian future where corporations run everything, and humans have merged with machines, and it’s a constant battle as a human being to maintain your individuality.
Of course, that could never happen. Phew!
Anyway, back then I was reading a lot of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick. (He was arguably the first cyberpunk.) All that stuff.
And at the time, things like “virtual reality” and “cyberspace” were starting to come into the common parlance. People were just learning that something called “internet” existed.
There’s a funny clip in the documentary of the Today Show in the early ‘90s. Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel are saying, “What is internet? Can somebody in the crew tell us what internet is?” They didn’t know. And that was after this album came out. So most people didn’t have a computer yet. It was still kind of nerd crap.
And it was like: “What is Billy Idol doing appropriating my culture? Why is this famous rock star trying to be a tech nerd?”
So the album failed because most people were baffled by it, and his intended audience, including myself, were outraged at this interloper.
Another thing I didn’t know about Billy Idol…
And the movie doesn’t talk about this. Grok actually pointed me to this. An A.I. informed me of this.
Billy Idol was possibly the first celebrity to “clap back,” as we now say. He clapped back at his haters online. Back before most people even knew there was such a thing as the internet.
In 1993, Billy Idol posted to the alt.cyberpunk newsgroup on Usenet.
Usenet was a precursor to… well, this. What you’re on right now. Before the web, before Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, there was Usenet. It was basically a message board, completely text-based.
I won’t read you the whole thing. But he’s posting under his real name, William Broad, and he’s responding to these cyberpunk fans — alt.cyberpunk — who think he’s a phony. They were gatekeeping, I think is the term we use now.
And his response was, to paraphrase: “Hey guys, I don’t claim to be an expert in any of this stuff. I just think it’s cool. I’m coming at this as a fan. I genuinely love this stuff, and I want more people to know about it.”
And from his perspective, it was the same energy as the original punks in the ‘70s. You don’t like what’s going on? Write a song about it. Start a band. DIY. Do it yourself.
He saw the potential of this new technology to address an audience directly. He could write and record an album at home, as he was recovering from this serious accident, without a bunch of record executives and lawyers and hangers-on looking over his shoulder.
Now, he couldn’t release the music online. That wouldn’t come until years later. Napster. But he saw the potential there. He saw what this new technology could do. He realized that one day it would change… everything.
I wish I had bought [the album], because he was doing stuff nobody else was doing back then. He put his email address in the liner notes. Nobody else was doing that. The CD came with a floppy disk, a 3.5” floppy. Nobody had done that.
Before almost anybody — anybody else in popular music, anyway — Billy Idol saw the future.
I think he was just ahead of his time. And frankly, it’s a little on-the-nose. Calling the album Cyberpunk, that was probably a mistake.
And the cover art is atrocious. It looks like a four-year-old just hitting random buttons in Microsoft Paint.
As for the album itself… I had never listened to it until this week. It’s on Spotify. Another example of the world that the cyberpunks predicted.
Cyberpunk is a concept album about a Blade Runner-like future. It’s kind of muddled. Most of the songs aren’t that memorable. The single that they put out was called “Shock to the System,” which had a really crazy music video. But nobody really liked it. It was too different than what he had done before.
And [the album’s] got all these spoken-word interludes throughout. He’s talking about corporations and stuff. Timothy Leary did one of the interludes.
Which is a cool idea, but it just slows things down. You’re listening to this album, you’re like: “Just, okay, just play the next song. What is this? I don’t care.”
Most of the songs are… not radio hits, let’s put it that way. But there’s one I really liked called “Power Junkie.” You can hear the song on YouTube. It’s kind of this driving, electro-rock, techno dance tune.
And he sounds great. He’s always been a great singer. Even if you were born blind and had no idea what he looked like, you could hear that voice, that powerful Billy Idol voice. And on “Power Junkie,” he’s howling and growling and doing all this Billy Idol stuff. It doesn’t sound anything like “Rebel Yell,” but it’s definitely Billy Idol.
So I really like that song, and I kind of feel bad that it took me 33 years to finally hear it.
Another funny thing about that album…
Which they don’t talk about in the movie. Grok told me about this one, too.
When Billy Idol was promoting this album, he insisted that any interviewers who wanted to talk to him first needed to read Neuromancer by William Gibson. Which is one of the first, if not the first cyberpunk novel. There’s even a song on this album called “Neuromancer.”
Then, as these reporters were interviewing him, it became obvious to them that… he had not read it.
This is according to William Gibson. He heard it secondhand. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, I don’t know.
But that does sound like a very rock-star, diva thing to do: “Read this novel so you understand what I’m doing. I haven’t read it, but y’know, I get the idea.”
I’m not even mad. That’s amazing.
But it just strikes me, as I work today on writing and recording a podcast — self-employed, entirely dependent on the internet to make my living, assisted by artificial intelligence, using an assumed name— it occurs to me that this guy was just miles ahead of almost everybody. He tried to tell us what was coming, the good and the bad, and we just weren’t ready yet in 1993.
I doubt Billy Idol will ever hear this, but…
My bad, Mr. Broad. I apologize. Sorry about that. I didn’t appreciate what you were doing at the time. And not only is the music better than I thought it was, but the message was prescient. (How’s that for a word? Google it.)
Let me quote that Usenet post I just mentioned. Billy Idol, addressing his detractors:
“Basically, f*** all of you who question my motives and/or integrity. You just don’t get it.”
Man, do I relate to that one.
And at the time, I didn’t get it. And I was wrong. We all were. Everybody on the internet today, in the future this man helped predict, owe this man an apology.
Sorry about that, Billy Idol.
Kind of a postscript…
Watching this movie, it’s interesting to watch a more mature Billy Idol talk about the old days. And I’ve been trying to figure out what’s different.
His personality…. It’s weird... He’s older, obviously. He looks good for his age, but whether that’s all-natural or not, I don’t know. He’s older, yet he acts younger somehow. Maybe not younger, but…
Back in the ‘80s, you know, he had that persona. The snarl, kind of a world-weary attitude. Very punk rock. I’m sure the drugs had something to do with that. But it was like he was at a distance from us. His audience. Everybody who wanted a piece of him.
But now, it’s like that barrier has come down. That protective armor that he wore. He seems more engaged, more energized, in a way that he wasn’t before. I don’t know that he’s off all drugs, but these days he just seems more together.
He’s got his $#!+ together. It only took 70 years, but he did it.
[Here’s the word you’re grasping for: sincerity. You’re welcome, dummy! — Ed.]
And he’s still writing and recording and touring. He’s still going.
Last year he put out a song called “Still Dancing,” which is an answer to “Dancing with Myself.” 45 years later. His voice isn’t what it was. That’s just inevitable with time. But he can still carry a tune, and it’s a really good one. I really like that song.
Billy Idol should be dead. And I’m damn glad he’s not.
A quick Happy Birthday to Coca-Cola! One hundred and forty years ago today, the very first glass of Coca-Cola was sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia.
I’m glad we allowed those people to rebuild.
I’m trying to imagine being the first person in the world to buy a Coke. Y’know, no advertising campaigns, no cola wars, no focus groups, none of that stuff. You’re just thirsty, you’re at the local soda fountain, and here’s this thing you’ve never tried before. “Sure, why not?”
We know who invented Coca-Cola: John Stith Pemberton. But we don’t know the name of that first customer. The first person to drink a Coke and say, “Hey, that’s pretty good. I gotta tell people about this!”
Without that guy, none of the rest of this would have happened. He’s the real hero. We’re the real heroes. Consumers.
God bless America!
Alright, that’s it. See ya later, seppos.
