For a black Jewish Christian married to Lisa Bonet who overoveroverdubbed his Hendrix-Beatles hybrid himself, not bad. But that's a lot of marketing to live down. B-
>>130971808Lenny Kravitz fucking sucks ass.
I WANT TO GET AWAYI WANT TO GET AWAYI WANT TO GET AWAYI WANT TO GET AWAYI WANT TO GET AWAY
They pushed him so hard back then.
>>130971808the debut wasn't that bad, afterwards he felt like he had to make concessions to airplay/commerciality and felt more false
>>130971808they liked to compare him to Hendrix/Prince but he was nowhere close to them as a guitarist
He can't write songs at all, any time he tries to write anything serious it's godawful and his music is derivative of other artists. I don't know who he is as an artist because he just imitates music we've already heard and does it so well that I can't see him through the copying.
>>130971808Lenny was in the early days a sign of the move away from 80s synthetic sheen back towards more rootsy sounds and had three good albums after which he ran out of gas.
he's disliked for being a rich nepo babby for one thing, but also because he was a blatant pastiche throwback ala Black Crowes and proof that mass culture was running out of ideas
I WANT A MILKY WAYI WANT TO EAT THE SUN
>>130971808he's very forgettable
after album two he forgot how to write rockers and filled out albums with boring balladslop
My parents had his greatest hits and I was forced to listen to it many times, so I am more familiar than I want to be with Lenny. His career can be split in a few different types of sound>70s cockrock imitations - are you gonna go my way, rock and roll is dead,the one he did with slash>60s ripoffs - let love rule (beatles), mr cab driver (lou reed)>"contemporary" electro rock - fly away, american woman>adult contemporary shitty ballads - see you again, pocket full of money or whatever where he goes country>soul/r&b - it aint over till its over (70s soul), black velveteen (y2k trip hop thing) His best stuff is the last one but he prefers doing the pop rock
>>130971808he's never managed an album that wasn't 50% filler although Circus was probably the worst as far as good material to filler ratio. a lot of people hated 5 for understandable reasons, one being that he used digital recording which he always claimed he would never do.
the song "Let Love Rule" is great. I sort of went along with some of the subsequent stuff for a while but yeah it was pretty bad.like anon says, "It Ain't Over...." is actually good. dat bout it.
"American Woman" is one of the single most facepalm-inducing covers ever.
>>130971808I'm old and I saw him on this tour, when he was touring the first album here. He opened for Tom Petty who was touring Full Moon Fever and his sound and performance were horrible. Made me fear that Petty would sound just as bad, until he came on and sounded great and delivered an excellent show. That forever solidified in my mind how bad Kravitz is.
He's nothing great on guitarDislike his voiceHate his hitsNever thought highly of his music in any way
I think Lenny will wind up being the last big black rock star.... and that's as much due to demographics as anything.Prince was already an established R&B star with a HUGE black audience before he broke through to the mainstream "white" crowd.... and that black audience arguably stuck with him MORE as he followed his own particular muse away from the charts in the 90s and beyond. (As someone who saw him many times in the 2000s, I can vouch that the crowd was always mixed but more black than white.)Lenny came along with more of a psychedelic Hendrix rock bent.... and while he had a few R&B-type songs like "It Ain't Over Til It's Over," his audiences were almost always white. He never really had a black audience.... which must've been an odd feeling for him, playing to mostly white crowds in the very white genre of "alternative rock." At the same time, there were other HUGE stars in the 90s who had a black fanbase and then expanded to a larger white audience: Mary J. Blige, Notorious BIG, Boyz II Men, Puff Daddy, Jodeci.... and then the "neo soul" movement with D'Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell, and others.... and of course, Destiny's Child which led to Beyonce being one of the biggest stars on the planet. The difference is that none of them played "rock" music.
And now? Why would a young talented black artist willfully confine him/herself to the increasingly narrow niche of rock, whose only audience is really white men at this point? Janelle Monae is a perfect example: She could have been the next Kravitz, but why? Her music and her audience--mostly young and female, and mixed between black and white--is far more diverse than that. Frank Ocean... Drake.... Travis Scott.... These artists are as big as Kravitz ever was with white audiences AND they have even bigger black audiences to boot. (And of course Beyonce.)I love Leon Bridges, but I wonder if he's annoyed that his retro style means he only appeals to an older white crowd, rather than his actual peer group. Similarly, Gary Clark Jr. is one of the most talented guitarists alive right now AND mixes genres just as well as Kravitz ever did.... But he's playing "rock," and therefore his audience is basically the same old white guys who love Joe Bonamassa. (And I say this as an old white guy who loves Gary.)As for Rucker, I vaguely knew him back in the Hootie days, and he was always comfortable as the sole black man in a sea of white faces. So it makes sense that he would find success in country music, where he's.... the sole black man in a sea of white faces.Sorry for the long post. I just think it's fascinating how demographics and genres shift over time. The modern equivalents of Sly or Prince are basically Drake and Beyonce, but whereas Sly & Prince added rock elements to their mix to appeal to a broader crowd, Drake and Beyonce have those massive audiences now without even a hint of rock in their sound.
>>130971808There are points like on the title track when he sounds like the slower RHCP songs.
>>130971808First thing here that’s made me lol in a while. I don’t mind Kravitz.
I went to his bahmitzvah
this album confirmed what we all knew which is his weakness as a songwriter
>>13097196510/10 song
Lenny Kravitz has and always will be cool.
>>130980147t. Lenny
>>130971808
