Last Saturday, we lost Chuck Berry, an artist who created the vernacular for one of America’s greatest popular idioms: rock ‘n’ roll. It’s hard to avoid cliché when discussing Berry’s work because of how deeply his influence permeates global culture, shaping everyone from Mick Jagger to Marty McFly. At the same time, it’s no overstatement that without Berry’s music, our idea of the American teenager or even as heady a subject as the American Dream might not be the same. But while much has been written about his greatness — including an excellent piece by Media Studies Prof. Jack Hamilton — I want to make the case for why Berry, and the genre he defined, still matter in a time in which echo chambers divide our music as much as our politics. We may be 60 years removed from Berry’s creative prime, but in its lyricism and restless energy, his music still offers a vision of what this country and rock ‘n’ roll can be when they strive to live up to their highest ideals.
More than anything else, Berry’s music imagined an America where the social barriers between people could be collapsed by an unstoppable backbeat. As a touring musician in Jim Crow America, Berry had to hire a white bus driver so that the driver could pick up food from restaurants that would refuse to serve Berry if he showed up in person. The need to appeal to white audiences prevented him from making the explicit racial statements, but in songs like “Brown Eyed Handsome Man,” Berry’s lyrics allude to the struggles he faced trying to make it in a country that didn’t value the lives of people like him. “Johnny B. Goode,” the first and best song about wanting to be a rock star, detailed the struggles of Berry’s “country boy” protagonist, a coded reference Berry originally wrote as “colored boy.” In spite of everything the character faces, by the end of the song, he realizes his version of the American dream, untarnished by racism or Berry’s own personal failings.
Today, rock ‘n’ roll is not the world-conquering force it was when Berry told Beethoven to roll over, but it is far from dead. Rock has been preoccupied with its own demise since Elvis joined the army in the late 1950s, and in 1979, the same year The Clash released London Calling and Joy Division put out Unknown Pleasures, Neil Young was preoccupied enough with rock’s impending death to record one of his greatest songs, “Hey Hey My My.”
By that point, rock had undergone what Jack Hamilton in Just Around Midnight describes as a “whitewashing,” setting up artificial genre barriers where white practitioners of soul like Hall and Oates were lumped in with rock and black innovators like Sly Stone and George Clinton were denied airplay on rock stations. As America has grown more diverse and hip hop has become synonymous with pop music, rock’s identification with the white, middle class male experience has hurt the genre, both popularly and creatively, while doing a disservice to Berry’s vision of the music as a racial unifier. For rock to live up to its storied legacy and remain relevant, it needs to recommit itself to the kind of America Berry’s music imagined.
The early signs are good that the music is proving durable enough to make this possible. Though she was robbed in some of the Grammy’s biggest categories, Beyoncé actually recorded one of last year’s best rock songs on Lemonade, “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” a collaboration with Jack White. On a smaller scale, artists like Mitski, PWR BTTM and Alabama Shakes are confounding expectations of what indie rock should look and sound like, proving guitar music in 2017 can still build on tradition rather than simply rehash it. Even Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” an album which wouldn’t be conventionally tagged with the “rock” label, features guitar-crossed sonic textures deeply indebted to The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix in order to make a record which elucidates our cultural conceptions of identity in a new way.
Writing about Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Austin Brown argues rock music at its best aspires towards universality by creating its own “secular spirituality.” The band or solo artist to achieve this lofty goal may not exist yet or even be possible in 2017’s anxious and culturally polarized America. You only need to listen to about 10 seconds of Johnny B. Goode’s opening guitar blasts to know that Chuck Berry believed in the idea. That unrealized optimism, just as much as his immeasurable influence, is why his songs still matter in an era when vinyl has given way to Spotify, and it is also why his music’s full potential has yet to be tapped.
Gray Whisnant is a former Opinion editor for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
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