Brown Eyed Handsome Man. Chuck Berry. Chess. 1956.

 The two most beautifully photographed faces of the twentieth century belonged to Billie Holiday and Jimi Hendrix. Both faces project an image of composed, preternatural calm, transcending artistic confidence, and articulating some nascent form of the language of glamour and modern celebrity. Aristocratic and modishly flawed, theirs is an unblemished beauty from the last century before the normalization of  technologically modified  human form. Another striking example of physical beauty enhanced by natural aging processes is the photographed face of Chuck Berry. Pronounced cheekbones, dark eyes animated by a restless intelligence, and a miscreant’s grin that, with skeleton key ease, deciphers the peculiar levity of his genius; these are the slyly bedeviled features that disclose the working apparatus of mid-century’s most playful imagination. Berry shares with Paul Newman an all-American countenance that reads like a map of masculine intrigue; in Newman’s case, an erotic slowburn with the power to singe the hair between moviegoers’ thighs. In Berry’s case, a sexually fueled gift for rhythmic aggression that unquestionably defines the human, animal condition. The son of a high school principal and a Baptist deacon, Berry burned with instincts that led him wide of institutional veneration, becoming an institution himself, a living repository of that post-atomic age air raid siren, the guitar riff, which he passed on to us in such classically refined form that today guitarists are continually adding commentary to its brilliancy with improvised, inspired notes of their own. Rock and roll is a cultural response to the demands of the human body struggling to express pleasure in the new age. The look of profound and ageless happiness on Chuck Berry’s face tells us as much. In an age when we’ve grown so overwhelmingly bored by the limited appearance and functionality of our natural bodies that we obsessively search and research methods for their deliberate deformation, it may only be a matter of time before full scale bio systemic augmentation is developed for privileged girls who wish to present publicly as Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror. What monstrous unimagined antirhythms will we create then for these reconstructed Cubist grotesques. Can Joseph Merrick do the Frug?

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