Customer Rating: 
Summary: More and Better than just the Godfather of Rap
Comment: Mr. Moore proudly bills himself as the Godfather of Rap, much as James Brown is the Godfather of Soul. His claim is well-founded, as his work dating back to the late 1960's was quite original and far ahead of its time. His achievments are far greater and more profound than merely the area of Rap music, which has never lived up to the name of Rudy Ray Moore in any of its other manifestations.In short, Moore was the point man of graphic sexual and excretory humor in the formerly Black, now African-American, mainstream, if not in American comedy in general. His poetry, in particular, creates numerous Homeric epics of pimping and prostitution, with the immortal Dolemite and Petey Wheatstraw as his Achilles and Odysseos. Indeed, Professor Henry Louis Gates has written persuasively on the West African folkloric roots of one of my favorite Moore characters, the Signifyin' Monkey, who also appears in Roger Abrahams' classic Deep Down in the Jungle.
For those of us Caucasians fortunate enough to get access to his party records in the early 70's, Rudy Ray Moore was a prophet of the treasures of filthy, but exquisitely funny dirty jokes and toasts. Sadly, in the mid to late '70's he shifted most of his talent to the area of Blaxploitation action films, at considerable personal financial as well as artistic loss. Still, the record of his Act at the Players' Clubs of Los Angeles is a great national treasure very unfairly overlooked by mainstream America. Lenny Bruce, for example, achieved a far larger reputation with far poorer material and delivery. The humor is not for the delicate or sensitive, but anyone with a genuine taste for powerful foul tastes should move heaven and earth to get a copy of this tape. It will reward your investment thousands of times over. Rudy Ray Moore, far more than Maya Angelou (or whoever it is now), deserves to be the true poet laureat of America and this movie proves why!
