Redd Foxx Uncensored CD

Producer: David Drozen.
Reissue producer: Lisa Cortes.
Includes liner notes by Shelby Meadows Ashford and Armond White.
Digitally remastered by Drew Lavyne (A.L.L. Digital, New York).
This collection has been released under a number of alternate titles, and is among the dozens of long-players that humorist Redd Foxx recorded in the 1960s and received little to no residual payments for. As the result of poor managerial and financial planning, Foxx owned the rights to precious little of his own work. This led to countless repackagings -- most of which were unauthorized -- of the exact same material. Additionally, any liner information is likewise lost to the ages. What modern listeners are presented with however, is a half-hour and change of a typically intimate 'after hours' night club set replete with all the good natured four-letter sexual and racial epithets one might anticipate. Beyond that, however, is the effortless way that Foxx re-spins the same yarns in a fresh context. He wastes no time with his perpetual slew of dirty double-entendres either, as his opening comments deal with the Pilgrims shooting bobcat as opposed to turkey, so that we could all "be eating pussy on Thanksgiving...." This immediately sets the tone for the rapid-fire ribald one-liners that fill the appropriately-titled Uncensored (1980). "Mashed Potatoes" is one of the more infamous cuts included on this set, as it was sampled by a few Manhattan club DJ's before being lifted by the Beastie Boys. Likewise, this album was referenced for A&E's "Biography" of Foxx, and the cuts "Horn Blowing," "Well Pussy," and "Tarzan's Yell" were all excerpted during the documentary. Another standout is the partial singalong of "Bye Bye Blackbird" -- titled here simply as "Bye, Bye" because, as Foxx "'splains "...I don't sing them other lines!" While the sound quality is a bit muffled -- to possibly mask vinyl surface noise -- the contents are completely audible. This is as good as any place to start when searching out the multitudes of dirty discs that bear Redd Foxx's name, and refreshingly honest sense of humor. ~ Lindsay Planer
Long before he was TV's Fred Sanford, Redd Foxx was considered the raciest comedian in the business. His small-label albums were sold strictly under the counter (at least in white record stores) until the late '60s. With its topical references to George Wallace and the March on Washington, UNCENSORED clearly dates from the earlier part of the decade. Most of the material is quite funny in a surprisingly innocent sort of way. In fact, if anything is shocking about UNCENSORED, it's how tame Foxx's sex and race jokes sound in an age of Def Comedy Jam and The Howard Stern Show. Still, this remains an interesting time-capsule artifact.