Bittersweet Little Rock And Roller
When Chuck Berry died last week, the music-loving world rose to acknowledge his status as, in Bob Dylan's words, the Shakespeare of rock and roll. The man was 90; people were ready. Jon Pareles, chief pop critic of The New York Times, and David Remnick, editor at The New Yorker, both immediately published lengthy obituaries. Musicians ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Questlove to Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones – Berry's famous protégé – rushed to pay tribute. Robert Christgau's 1976 essay declaring Berry "the greatest of the rock and rollers" recirculated on social media, as did Carl Sagan and his Cosmos co-creator Ann Druyan's 1986 letter informing Berry that a recording of "Johnny B. Goode" had been transported into space on the Voyager spacecraft. A particularly eloquent remembrance by Minneapolis City Pages editor Keith Harris declared Berry "inventor of the rock lyric, interpreter of teenage dreams."
Notably absent from this flood of panegyrics were the voices of women. In fact, the stroll through cyberspace that's now part for lost celebrities reveals that throughout his long career, women rarely wrote about Berry at all. (Notable exceptions include Lillian Roxon's entry in her Rock Encyclopedia, which declared Berry the "single most important name in the history of rock" seven years before Christgau did; and a few contemporary writers, including Annie Zaleski and , whose analysis of the erotics of Berry's "My Ding-a-Ling" is essential.) Nor have many women musicians — Patti Smith stands out as one — declared themselves Berry acolytes. The universal language Berry did so much to establish, of cars and girls and teen freedom and American dreaming, apparently doesn't resonate that profoundly with many women.
