"You should not even get on stage and attempt to be funny," Chris Rock said recently, "unless you realize you're never going to be as funny as Richard Pryor."

Anyone who doubts the truth of that statement is referred to ...And It's Deep Too! The Complete Richard Pryor Warner Brothers Recordings (1968-1992), a nine-CD box set just out on Rhino. Especially on the three complete concerts included, Pryor is revealed as not just the funniest man who ever lived, but an actor, a mimic, and a student of American history with few peers as well.

All of this only partially explains why millions of people love Richard Pryor so much. The rest of the answer lies in Pryor's love of humanity, which he sends out both as explicit valentines and in the way he pokes savage fun at human foibles, always beginning with himself. If a guy as cool as Richard Pryor can be so fucked up and still love himself, that makes it possible for the rest of us to walk through that door with confidence, knowing that whatever private party our demons want to throw for us, Pryor will be there with us in spirit.

What gets lost in all the hoopla about Pryor's brilliant routines about sex and drugs is that he's also the most incisive political entertainer we've ever had. He started out as a Cosby clone, a regular guest on Ed Sullivan (thankfully, none of his early material is included on the boxed set) and was having considerable success until he decided that he was tired of being irrelevant in a world that was going up in flames.

Unlike today's phony "political" comedians like Bill Maher, Richard Pryor took sides. He was always with the poor against the rich. Above all, he hated the police, whom he saw as inherently vile and brutal. He could sum up complicated realities in a heartbeat: "The Japanese sent people to UCLA and UC Berkeley. There wouldn't have been no Pearl Harbor if they had sent people to the University of Alabama or the University of Mississippi."

Pryor's relentless spotlight on hypocrisy was presented as a challenge to be met, not just cynical poking in an open wound. On a disc of outtakes here, That African-American's Crazy: Good Shit From the Vaults, Pryor tells in hushed tones of a conversation with God, who has asked to see Emmitt Till. Pryor has to tell God that Till was lynched in 1957. God gasps, takes a step back, and murmurs, "But he was such a good young man."

"Well, then," God finally says, "I'd like to see my son. How's my kid doing?"

Whatever the subject, Richard Pryor told the truth. As he wrote in his autobiography, Pryor Convictions, "You start telling the truth to people and people are going to look at you like you was askin' to fuck their mama or somethin'. The truth is gonna be funny, but it's gonna scare the shit out of folks."

As a Muslim convert I feel that there is no legitimate reason that Muslim Arabs from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Palestine or Jordan should be selling products to black people that they would never try to sell in their own countries. However, I also feel that to vandalize and burn down these stores also reflects badly on Islam. The Muslim shopkeepers, vandals, arsonists, and kidnappers have all done wrong by their neighbors and by Islam.

Somewhere between tearing the building apart and doing nothing lies a non-violent solution that can be enacted by the community. The time for peace is now. However, unless and until the issue of liquor-store infestations of black ghettos are properly addressed, I fear we may see more of the opposite.

The bigger problem for the community was that liquor stores were poor substitutes for grocery stores. Since the 1965 Watts Riots, very few supermarkets had reopened, and even fewer were built in the area. Vons had three hundred stores in the region, but only two in South Central. Worse, study after study found that supermarkets in South Central were the most expensive in the county, with grocery prices up to 20 to 30 percent higher than those in the suburbs and exurbs. Politicians would not do anything about it. It was as if they figured liquor was more important to inner-city residents than food. Immigrant liquor-store entrepreneurs did not provide what people really needed, but they still filled a void that no one else was willing to.

"The Dead are thus the latest victims of the notion that digital copying is qualitatively different from every recording technology since the invention of music notation. Yes, digital copying is fast; it's exact; it's easy. For a recording business that has realized far too late that it is selling music, not discs, digital copying has destroyed the old monopoly on pressing and distribution.

Digital downloads can also provide numbers for accountants to tabulate and for statistics-mongers to misinterpret. (Just because 10,000 people download a concert doesn't mean 10,000 people would pay for it.)

Oddly enough, the numbers also seem to encourage visions of wringing every statutory nickel out of every recording ever made. In conformity to copyright law that was designed for sheet music and discs rather than the Web, visions persist of the Internet not as a cornucopia, but as a pay-per-play jukebox. The Deadheads' old trading network had looked back to an earlier model: music as folklore.

Suddenly, after all these amicable and profitable years, Dead representatives are talking about "rights" to those concert recordings. It's lawyer talk, record-business talk, and entirely valid on those terms; the Dead do hold copyrights and are entitled to authorize or withhold permission to copy their work. (So, incidentally, are those who own the copyrights to Dead concert staples like Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away." )

Enforcing that permission on the Internet is another matter. Digital-rights management by technical means is iffy at best: widely circumvented by professional pirates and problematic for consumers trying, for instance, to transfer songs from their CD's to an iPod. Sony BMG Music, trying to limit copying of CD's, included software that created security hazards in its paying customers' computers and is now recalling some four million CD's and facing lawsuits. The next Windows operating system may place anticopying mechanisms beyond users' control.

The Dead's problem is more temporal than technical. Grateful Dead recordings, including soundboard recordings, have been circulating since the inception of the Internet and are not going to disappear by fiat.

The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CD's to show their loyalty. The new approach, giving fans some but not all of what they had until last week, changes that relationship.

No doubt it will sell some additional concert downloads in the short run. But by imposing restrictions, it will also encourage jam-band fans - a particularly Internet-savvy demographic - to circumvent those restrictions, finding the soundboard recordings through unofficial channels. The change also downgrades fans into the customers they were all along. It removes what could crassly be called brand value from the Dead's legacy by reducing them to one more band with products to sell.

Will the logic of copyright law be more profitable, in the end, than the logic of sharing? That's the Dead's latest improvisational experiment.