Review: ‘Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling’ — Richard Pryor’s Brutal Self-Interrogation
This bleak comedy-drama sees one of America’s most beloved comics get personal
My first encounters with Richard Pryor were, ironically, not through his many screen appearances or through his work as one of the most admired stand-up comedians of all time.
No. Instead, the two first times I ever heard about Pryor were both through hip-hop lyrics — Kendrick Lamar’s reference to ‘the yams’ bringing ‘it out of Richard Pryor’ (a metaphor for wealth and fame corrupting Pryor and destroying his life) on ‘King Kunta’ from To Pimp a Butterfly but, more starkly, a seemingly throwaway reference to the character Jo Jo Dancer in the opening track of Danny Brown’s masterpiece Atrocity Exhibition, a hectic, impossibly intense album all about Brown’s self destructive addiction experiences.
That opening song, ‘Downward Spiral’, is oddly paced and establishes the eerie, disorienting tone of the rest of the record perfectly as Brown dizzyingly raps about being on a bender in ways explicit and directly confrontational in his usual nasally intonation:
