Richard Pryor LP

A legend. Electric. Transformative. The greatest of all time. There’s no superlative that Richard Pryor hasn’t already earned, and with good reason. From the very start, his voice was both singular, truly unmatched, and plural, containing multitudes. In a breath, he embodies a full swath of humanity, dropping his audience into the raucousness of Hank’s Place, becoming everyone from the streetwise handyman to the lecherous farmers, beautiful black Irma who loved to tell people to kiss her ass to Weasel who spent all the time he wasn’t signifying on negging potential marks. He dances between pimps Coldblood and Smooth, dips into the persona of Tarcy the cop, and transforms into tight-lipped Jesse, the basketball beast. In another, he paints an entire scene-within-a-scene with “Prison Play.” He’s everyone (a not uncomfortable feature of his existence: having grown up Black in a Jewish tenement in an Italian neighborhood, he jokes that the general attitude among the local toughs was “Get him! He’s all of ‘em!”), everything, everywhere. Along the way, Pryor punctuates every laugh with a jab, sharply rebuking all the social ills that seek to divide and conquer, all the filthy, inhumane -isms that offend the senses (or rightly should). And he does it all while assuring his audience they have nothing to fear from the Black man—except his thoughts.