Off the Charts: Billy Idol

Rock the cradle of love at your own risk

By Newt Briggs

If any rock star besides Iggy Pop holds the key to eternal life, that person is likely Billy Idol--the ageless iconoclast who's been whooping out his rebel yell since MTV was little more than the neon reflection on a cartoon astronaut's faceshield. While this apparent immortality doesn't explain Cyberpunk--Idol's disastrous attempt to restyle himself as a real-life Max Headroom--it goes a long way toward justifying "Rock the Cradle of Love," which is essentially an ode to having sex with underage girls.

Not that there's ever been anything particularly taboo about rocking out to lascivious dreams of wide-eyed teenyboppers. Take AC/DC's "Love at First Feel," for example: "I didn't know if you were legal tender/ But I spent you just the same." Or Motorhead's "Jailbait": "I don't even dare to ask your age/ It's enough to know you're here backstage." Or even Oingo Boingo's "Little Girls": "Uh-oh, I'm in trouble/ Uh-oh, the little girl was just too little."

Of course, actual underage fornication has always been frowned upon by the rock 'n' roll establishment. It's one thing to sing about getting it on with a high school groupie, another thing entirely to put these deviant sexual thoughts into action. Somehow, Elvis Presley got away with dating Priscilla when she was only 14, but the history of pop is littered with the withered carcasses of musicians who fought the statutory rape law and lost.

Jerry Lee Lewis: The Killer played piano with more belly fire than any man alive or dead, but when he deplaned in England and announced his marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Myra Gail, the only shaking going on was that of the world's collective head. Lewis' records were immediately pulled from radio stations across the country, and his booking price plummeted from $10,000 a night to $250 in any backwater juke joint that would still let him thump the keys. And to think, he was once as big as the King himself. If only someone would have told him to dunk those great balls of fire into a bucket of ice.

Chuck Berry: It's probably no surprise that the author of "Sweet Little Sixteen" ("She's got the grown-up blues") would land himself in the pokey for doing the pokey with a girl of suspect maturity. In fact, Berry earned 18 months in the federal pen for transporting a 14-year-old hat-check girl from El Paso to St. Louis for what the U.S. District Court deemed "immoral purposes." His career was never the same again and was officially quashed when he was returned to jail in 1979 for income tax evasion.

R. Kelly: If R. Kelly wasn't such an avid amateur filmmaker, he might never have been exposed as the heterosexual Michael Jackson of the new millennium. Yet Kelly couldn't resist secretly taping his sexual trysts with his underage partners, including one 26-minute episode in which a man with a remarkable resemblance to him is seen urinating on a 14-year-old girl. Unfortunately, it was far from the first teenage skeleton in Kelly's closet. Ten years ago, Kelly married R&B diva Aaliyah--then only 15 years old. Both subsequently denied the report, even though Vibe published an authenticated copy of their marriage certificate. In 2002 and 2003, Kelly was arrested for multiple counts of possessing child pornography, yet by some miracle of public ignorance and his silky-smooth croon, his 2004 album Happy People/U Saved Me peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top 200.