All Hail Chuck Berry - And Berry Cosby, not Praise Him

Interesting. Chuck Berry lived to 90 in comfort, was invited to play any time he wanted, and nobody said, "Hey, he was sexually perverted with over 70 women that HE HAD TO PAY OFF to SETTLE LAWSUITS."

Over 70. That's more than the 50 complaints against Bill Cosby, which mostly involve strippers, Playboy club waitresses, bimbo actresses, and women who were coming onto a married man because they wanted to get money or a TV acting role without working too hard for it. Berry's victims were all strangers to him who were victims of his camcorder spy camera in a bathroom at his restaurant.

Previously? The guy was sent to jail for over a year for, what was it, bringing an underage whore over state lines? Or was that a set-up, like his reform school stint for stealing cars and committing burglary?

SCREW magazine routinely ran ads in the paper, and on their "Midnight Blue" TV cable show, for a VHS tape called "Is That Chuck Berry Pissing?" Chuck had a fondness for having sex with some white woman and urinating all over her, before or after. Well, he was certainly a pioneer. He did all this before R. Kelly.

Yet, today Berry is front page news, and quotes from Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen and anyone else who wants to get in on it, have seized on Berry and praised him (to modify a Flip Wilson gag about Julius Caesar).

Even, who IS this, some aging punkette is hoisting a YouTube video and declaring her love for the PIONEER OF ROCK AND ROLL. I wonder if she would've been so thrilled if she was a victim of his bathroom camcorder.

HAIL HAIL Chuck Berry, pioneer of rock and roll.

Why? Because we expect rock stars to be nasty bastards. They're up there swaggering, duck-walking, goose-stepping, snarling, spitting, rubbing their long-necked guitars up and down, and even grabbing crotch. Groupies, groupies and MORE groupies. Wow! Women are supposed to be humiliated by rock stars!

These days, Bill Cosby is not only a pariah, but his accomplishments have been trivialized and even discarded.

Chuck Berry was a pioneer of rock and roll. Yes. He did write and record a rather measly half-dozen memorable Top 20 songs, most of them between 1955 and 1958. A half-dozen songs is ONE side of a "Greatest Hits" album.

Bill Cosby won 5 gold records in a row for his albums. Not singles lasting 3 minutes. Full albums over 30 minutes each. He won as many Grammy awards.

Bill Cosby won 3 Emmy awards for what was certainly a pioneering TV show. He broke racial barriers by co-starring in "I Spy" and he did it with NO acting experience. How many non-actors end up getting 3 Emmy awards in a row for their first TV series?

Bill Cosby went on to bring back "family" sitcoms with "The Cosby Show," a program that once again tried to prove equality by ignoring racial tensions and showing that a black family could be middle class and have the same comical problems as any other family.

Cosby was probably the first black face that white America came to truly love. He had the highest likability rating of anyone on the planet, which led to his endless TV commercials for Jell-o and other products. People may have been amused by Sammy Davis Jr. on stage, but that didn't mean he'd be welcome at home. At a time when African-Americans were being vocal about being equal, and not wanting to ride in the back of the bus, or go to a "Blacks Only" restaurant, Cosby was showing America, "You have nothing to fear." Wasn't he?

How many people began to see racism for the sickness that it is, when they thought, "The KKK hates Negroes? They want to lynch them all? They consider them all inferior? They'd lynch BILL COSBY?"

Bill Cosby was humanizing Black people via his humor, and you'd have to be truly insane to deny him access to a bathroom because it was "for whites only." Chuck Berry? He put a hidden camera in a bathroom. But he's a rock star.

And today, Chuck Berry is receiving nothing but praise as a pioneer, and as an enduring performing working for over 50 years (even if his creative output was pretty much confined to five of those years, and all he did afterward was play the same songs over and over if people gave him enough cash).

If anyone even mentions some of the bad things Berry did, or how "ornery" he could be, it's tempered by a shrug of "well, he was a rock star." Anything else? He grew up poor, so we have to allow for that. (So did Cosby).

The double standard is that people are eager to forgive a "rock star" anything. Being a "rock star" is excuse enough.