Lenny Kravitz: Lenny : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Lenny first showed up in 1989 as the Let Love Rule guy, a Jimi clone buried in so many ruffles, feathers and beads he accidentally turned into a Cher clone. The rock nation didn't know what to make of him: Was he a sensitive song-poet, a stupid poseur, a sexy poseur or just another L.A. showbiz stud muffin who'd rented Purple Rain too many times? But it's safe to say that nobody imagined we'd still be hearing his name twelve years later. And yet, through the years, Kravitz has doggedly stuck to his mission of fabricating 1972-vintage bar-band rock in loving detail, scoring one massive radio hit after another. Sometimes his hits are really great ("Again"), sometimes they're bloody awful ("Believe"), sometimes they sound exactly like "American Woman" ("Fly Away") and once in a while they really are "American Woman" ("American Woman"). But if the guy has ever felt embarrassed once in his life, he got away with it when the cameras weren't rolling.

On his new album, the absurdly if inevitably titled Lenny, the Krav matches his ambition as a rock star with his modesty as a musical craftsman - he still offers little in the way of personal expression, much less musical innovation or original ideas. He's hardly one of the great groundbreakers, or even one of the great imitators. But he has steadily warmed to his Seventies shtick. He had to learn on the job, figuring out how to ditch the tricks he wasn't so hot at (imitating Prince, Sly Stone, and Earth, Wind and Fire) and concentrate on his true calling, which is imitating Aerosmith, Foghat and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. He's a true pop production, which means his songs are only designed to start meaning something when you experience them in a public place, preferably a car radio or a mall sound system. Last year's "Again" was his finest hit ever, a ponderous, overstated, anonymous and unimpeachably convincing breakup ballad, as well as an answer record to Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn." "Again" was the perfect capper to last year's greatest-hits album, which kicks the holy crap out of similar best-of collections by the likes of Tom Petty, Bryan Adams and John Mellencamp - when retro is your whole point, you may as well go off the deep end with it, and personal expression would just get in the way.

Nothing on Lenny can match "Again," but he gets close sometimes, lumbering with a meatball sense of purpose that's all his own. It takes a rare kind of rock-star gall to use the title "Yesterday Is Gone" for a power ballad that evokes Bon Jovi circa 7800o Fahrenheit, and Kravitz is surely the only singer alive who would dare to serenade his lady with the words, "Just spread your wings and go with the tide," a lyric that by no conceivable stretch of the English language means anything at all. He never says or does anything remotely controversial, so when he titles Lenny's climactic lift-every-Bic anthem "Let's Get High," the only question is whether Kravitz is getting high on (a) the power of love, (b) the spirit of peace or (c) light and truth and soul and the sweet harmony of love's peaceful spirit of truthfulness. (Answer: a, which was also Huey Lewis' drug of choice back in the day.)

As usual, the turkeys on Lenny are the ones where Kravitz tries to get up-to-date, with bungled attempts at two-step and hip-hop production only showing how sincerely stuck in the Seventies he is. He really takes off with the slick riff monsters, especially "Dig In," "Bank Robber Man" and "If I Could Fall In Love." Despite the accidentally timely "Battlefield of Love," Lenny has nothing to say about today; you can always tell which song was playing on the classic-rock station when Kravitz's clock radio went off that morning. So his big statement, "God Save Us All," doesn't impress you with its blandly preachy tone: Yeah, right, the Supreme Being is gonna bail out his children this time because another rock star learned to rhyme life with strife? No, what impresses you is the way the song duplicates Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way" with such scrupulous accuracy, right down to the precise Walshian dynamics of the voice-box guitar solo. As a new Hendrix, Kravitz was as inadequate and corny as any other new Hendrix, but on Lenny he's more at home in his role as a new Joe Walsh, cranking out guitar rock for a pop audience - a field that Kravitz by now has all to himself.