"I don't want to die and them say, 'The Black Lenny Bruce is dead.'"

Notes on a native son:

+Jill Nelson's prescient take from 1998:

"Richard Pryor is both the best and worst of a time gone but not forgotten, a reflection of our own passions, fears and self-destruction. He may not have died for our sins, but he lived many of them fully, publicly, with gusto."

+David Felton Interviews Richard Pryor in 1974: (MP3)

"I think that people should say what they feel. I don't give a fuck if it's racism or whatever ism it is. Just to be yourself is such a nice thing and to have to jive all the time just to deal with people or to make money is the bad part about it. I like to be accepted. I want to be accepted but usually in order to be accepted by white people you have to compromise everything from your hello."

+ Greg Tate is a beast:

"With the fluidity of bebop and the cutthroat poetics of the blues, he made Blackness articulate and conceptual in ways that respected nuance and transcended mimicry and minstrelsy."

+It's just like a man--in the sense that it is imbued with a phallic audaciousness, and conversely audacious fallacy-- to say, in this excessively laudatory tribute to Richard Pryor:

"Rich was also the first male comedian, Black, white or otherwise, who gave a real voice to women in his comedy. In Pryor's routines, women gave every bit as good as they got. For all the rants about his self-indulgences, addictions and misogynistic leanings*, his humor was a shining example of equality in a society rife with inequities."

One thing I know for sure, is that he/He (edward rhymes/Men) does not on the lower, higher, or in-between frequencies speak for me/Me (jb/Women). It's a testament to thriving inequalities and unmitigated privilege that he/He still does.

*Excuse me while I light my tiff but what the fuck are "misogynistic leanings"? The slope of this bridge called my back?! A thankless mule's unmistakable ungangsta lean?! Let's talk truth. Either is is or it isn't and in this case, it is. It was cryptically woven into all that skill and all that talent.