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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com hitparadeplus you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again to join, that's slate.com hitparade plus thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Melanphy, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series on today's show. Nine years ago this week at a New York concert in Madison Square Garden, pop star Bruno Mars brought out a surprise guest. This guy's one of my favorites.
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Ladies and gentlemen, show some love to Mr. Lenny Kravit. 1, 2, 4.
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This was not the first time Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars would appear on a stage together. And it would not be the last. Kravitz had first appeared at a Mars concert the prior year in Paris. The following year, at a 2015 Kravitz concert in Hollywood, Mars made a surprise appearance singing from the aud. Surprise. Celebrity cameos at concerts are a not uncommon occurrence, especially when musicians play major cities like New York, Los Angeles or Paris. But the repeat run ins between Kravitz and Mars were, I would argue, something else, a cosmic synergy between hit making generations. Because it would not be too grand to say that Bruno Mars. Was a kind of successor to Lenny Kravitz.
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If you wanted, you got it. You just got to believe.
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From the start of his career at the turn of the 90s, Kravitz was an open emulator of his musical heroes from a prior generation. Lenny was a flower child hippie for Generation X, before that whole vibe was considered cool. Fans and critics would play spot the influence on Lenny's hits, sometimes with delight, often scorn. But Kravitz was not above flaunting his influences. And speaking of flaunting influences, Bruno Mars was, if anything, an even more shameless culture vulture. A decade after Kravitz's peak, Bruno Mars seemed to pick up the baton with original songs that owed a debt to his elders, both Bruno's own hits. And the hits Mars and his songwriting partners penned for other acts. Eventually, Lenny and Bruno became such an inescapable part of the hit making firmament that their style jacking became almost invisible.
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All of my life where have you been? I won.
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Today on Hit Parade, we will compare the hit making careers of two expert genre chameleons, one from the 90s and aughts, the other from the tens and twenties, to see how attitudes towards such borrowings evolved over the decades. In an era when artists now gleefully pillage from the music of earlier generations. The the criticisms Leni and Bruno endured seem almost quaint today. And when you're topping the charts, questions of influence tend to fall by the wayside. And that's where your hit parade marches today, the week ending August 24, 1919, when Lenny Kravitz reached his all time peak on Billboard's Hot 100 of number two with It Ain't Over Till It's over, an unabashed homage to early 70s soul that directly foreshadowed. This number one hit from 20 years later, Leave the Door Open, Bruno Mars's 2021 smash collaboration with Anderson Paak as the retro soul duo Silk Sonic. In both cases, these homages to the era of Sly Stone, the Delfonics and the Stylistics were called out for their shameless appropriations and nonetheless became massive hits. How did Lenny and Bruno, friends and admirers of each other's work, take full advantage of the musical Wayback Machine to score on the charts? In our prior Hit Parade episode on Billy Joel, I talked about how the so called Piano man was really the pastiche man, adopting song tropes and production styles from both his forebears and his contemporaries and turning them all into Billy Joel music. So on tracks like say Goodbye to Hollywood, Joel doesn't mind if you notice that he is emulating the production style of the old girl groups, down to the whoa oh oh he has borrowed from Ronnie Spector, Joel even recorded a whole album, 1983's An Innocent man, filled with stylistic impersonations. His enduring hit Uptown Girl was a knowing homage to the four Seasons. Like Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars, the two subjects of this episode, Billy Joel has endured more than his share of carping from music critics, but criticism of Joel tended to focus on his middle of the road material and its arm's length relationship to rock and roll. Few critics directly accused Joel of being a copycat.
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Everybody's talking about the new sound. Funny, but it's still rock and roll to me.
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Kravitz and Mars were not so lucky. Kravitz in particular was tarred with the insult rip off artist more than once and Mars has been accused of cultural appropriat.
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Saturday night Are we in the spot? Don't believe me?
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Just watch. The fact that these criticisms stuck for a time to Kravitz and Mars, both of whom are multiracial more than they attach to Billy Joel surely has something to do with racism or at the very least, racial essentialism. The idea that artists of color are supposed to stick to their musical lane.
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And there were times I wasn't even.
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Now but to meet the critics part way, I would say that Kravitz and Mars have been even more deliberate style jockeys than Billy Joel was. Both clothes horses and fashion icons, Lenny and Bruno try on musical styles like couture playing dress up with a sense of wit and a wink. They are both sincere in their admiration of their musical heroes and frisky in their raiding of pop's style closet. The debate of course, is over the artistic validity of this approach. As with Billy Joel, eventually the sonic explorations of Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars came to seem less like appropriations or affectations and more like expressions of their actual musical interests. And they were just so good at. Before I walk through these chameleons respective careers, let's establish some commonalities that will recur in their hit making stories. Like Prince and Tom Petty, a pair of artists I compared in an early episode of Hit Parade, who also shared a live stage one legendary time, Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars have some uncanny undersung similarities that recur in their rise to fame. The first, commonality? A deep familial foundation in old fashioned showbiz. Second, eclectic backgrounds that gave them an ability to both play and write in an array of styles not just for themselves, but for other hit makers. And third, a knack for boiling a style down to its most irresistible elements. These men don't bore us. They get to the chorus. One last thing about Lenny and Bruno, they didn't borrow from just any previous artists. They wanted to emulate legends. And even though both of these men were born well after the birth of rock and roll, to unlock their musical heritage we need to start with the big guys. The King of Rock and Roll and the Fab Four. I love you more As a toddler in the mid-60s, Leonard Albert Kravitz loved the Beatles. This song in particular, in My Life, would later play at Lenny's wedding, and he latched on to the group's sound right away. Born in New York City in May 1964, which technically makes Lenny a tail end baby boomer, but publicly he has identified more as a Generation Xer on the cusp, Kravitz caught the Beatles at the peak of their fame at a very formative age. He loved the melodic skill of Paul McCartney.
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Hey Jude, don't Let Me down.
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But spiritually, John Lennon was closest to his heart, including Lennon's early solo work with wife Yoko Ono. In his memoir, Let Love Rule, Kravitz recalls his mother taking him to hippie rallies where throngs of protesters harmonized on Lenin's anti war anthem Give Peace a Chance.
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Yes.
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Speaking of his mom, Kravitz was steeped in showbiz from a very young age. The product of a biracial couple, Lenny was born to Cy Kravitz, a white NBC TV news producer, and Roxy Roker, a black theater actress who won acclaim on Broadway and made a big move into television in the 1970s. Roker was best known for her role as Helen Willis on the CBS sitcom the Jeffersons, in which she traded witty barbs with her neighbor Sherman Helmsley's George Jefferson.
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Well, I guess that leaves you and me. Yeah, it's been a bad night all around.
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Growing up, both of Lenny's parents exposed him to the vagaries of show business, especially music. Roker played classic soul by the likes of Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder for the young Kravitz and Cy. Kravitz, in addition to his extensive network of TV contacts, also befriended a number of jazz greats, including Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Short and legendary bandleader Duke Ellington, who, at Cy and Roxy's request, led the Duke Ellington band through a rousing happy birthday for young Lenny one night at the Rainbow Room. But the music Lenny naturally gravitated toward was rock and soul. In his memoir, Kravitz talks rapturously about the time his father surprised him with tickets to a concert by the Jackson 5, whom Kravitz called formative both for their music and for their big Afro style. A bit later, after Lenny and his mother moved to la, when she scored her TV role, Kravitz was turned on to rock music, keying into Jimi Hendrix.
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Foxy Lady, Foxy.
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And Led Zeppelin. Kravitz said his quote, head exploded in junior high school the first time he heard Zeppelin's Black Dog Got a Roll.
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Can'T stand still Got a flaming heart can't get my feel.
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Finally, by high school, Lenny was inspired by the young Prince, whom he called, quote, the me I wanted to be. Kravitz was especially impressed that Prince did all of his own writing, most of the playing and even his own production. A model Lenny would later emulate. As he started composing his own music in the 80s, friends told him he sounded like Prince crossed with John Lennon, specifically the contemplative Lo Fi Lennon of his post Beatles period. On the Plastic Ono Band LP Love.
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Is Knowing We Can Be.
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All of these influences would wind up in the music Kravitz started writing in his teens and early twenties. Meanwhile, as Lenny Kravitz spent the early to mid-80s knocking around LA trying to find his big break in music, a boy was born in Honolulu, Hawaii to another showbiz family. And this kid's favorite boyhood musician was similarly iconic. Wise men say Only fools Run. As a toddler in Waikiki, young Peter Gene Hernandez, born in October 1985 and nicknamed Bruno by age 2, was taught to revere Elvis Presley by his family. They all sang and played instruments. One of Bruno's uncles was an Elvis impersonator, and by age 3, so was Bruno. Here's a clip of Bruno performing as Little Elvis while still in kindergarten was crowded. Bruno's mother, Bernadette, was Filipina, and his father, Peter Hernandez, half Puerto Rican, half Jewish. There's another thing Bruno and Lenny have in common. Made his bones singing Little Richard songs in a local Honolulu cover band called the Love Notes. For his part, Bruno, when not covering Presley, loved to imitate Michael Jackson, yet another artist both he and Lenny Kravitz worshiped. And Bruno had a special knack for recreating the dance moves from Jackson videos like Billie Jean and Beat It. But imitating Elvis was Bruno's bread and butter. In 1992, Bruno scored his first big break when he appeared in the Nicholas Cage Sarah Jessica Parker movie Honeymoon in Vegas, which featured a troupe of Presley impersonators called the Flying Elvises. Little Bruno Hernandez got a showcase slot in the film. Bruno's Little Elvis became the star attraction at his father's Love Notes concerts and began to eclipse them. Bruno appeared at halftime at football's Aloha bowl and on the Arsenio Hall Show. He was even interviewed on MTV by Weasley vj, Pauly Shore, Bruno, it says.
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Right here you're the world's youngest Elvis impersonator. I said that I started when I was teenager. They didn't believe me. So you've been doing it for four years? Two years, yeah. Elvis was the first one I knew and the first one that I knew.
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As he aged into tweendom and continued performing with his dad's cover band, Bruno Hernandez expanded his repertoire, adding songs by other classic rock and rollers from decades before his birth, including Frankie Lyman and Little Anthony. Here's young Bruno performing with the Love Notes, the Jackie Wilson classic Lonely Teardrops. By the time he was a teenager, like young Lenny Kravitz before him, Bruno had found himself drawn to self contained performers with instrumental skill. Like Lenny, Bruno taught himself guitar after listening to Jimi Hendrix, Let Me Stand Next to. And before going on stage, Bruno would psych himself up by playing Prince's Purple Rain. Entering the awkward teenage years, Bruno still had moves. At the Aloha Las Vegas Revue In 2001, he was captured on video executing letter perfect dance moves as Michael Jackson. In short, like Lenny Kravitz two decades before, who was raised on TV sets and surrounded by jazz and pop musicians, Bruno Hernandez was surrounded by showbiz, a scrappier form of showbiz that got him in front of cameras at a tender age and he took to it like a duck to water. However, also like Lenny, Bruno's exposure did not guarantee him adult stardom. Both young men would have to hustle to build a career at age 17 again, like Lenny, Bruno moved to LA to seek music biz fame. And when he got there, he changed his performing name to Bruno Mars. We'll come back to the renamed Bruno Mars a bit later. Speaking of name changes, when Lenny Kravitz began hustling his music in la in the 80s, he renamed himself Romeo Blue. He even tried on blue contact lenses to give himself a more exotic look. On an early 80s interview on TV's the Mike Douglas show, mom Roxy Roker, now many years into her stardom on the Jeffersons, expressed bemusement at her son's chosen path.
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You have a son, I'm told, and the kids have told me he's a handsome looking young man. Has he thought about following in mom's footsteps? Not in my footsteps at all.
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He wants to to be a musician, but he does want to be a show business? Well, yes.
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Oh yes, it's new wave and you know, hey man, that kind of thing.
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Yeah, for a hot second it really did seem like new wave would be the chosen genre for the renamed Romeo Blue. He led a band called Wave for a while and in the mid-80s, when he got the attention of A and M Records. The label that had just signed Janet Jackson, an A and R man, wanted to turn Romeo Blue and a team of other musicians into a black Duran Duran. Girls Will Keep the Secret Lenny, AKA Romeo Blue, turned the A and M deal down. In fact, Lenny Kravitz turned down several deals in the 80s, uninspired by the kinds of music the major labels were willing to invest in. At one point, an electro pop band he had recorded demos with was offered a firm deal with Capitol Records and after weeks of dithering, Kravitz turned that deal down too. The band, by the way, found a new lead singer. A former member of the Puerto Rican boy band Menudo, signed with Capital and released their album under the band name Maggie's Dream. The album failed to chart. By 1987, the would be Romeo Blue had changed his name back to Lenny Kravitz at the encouragement of his new girlfriend, actress Lisa Bonet. Famed for the role of Denise Huxtable on both the Cosby show and its spin Off A Different World, Bonet had earned a reputation as an assertive rebel on the show and a latter day hippie wild child and she inspired Kravitz to hold out for a record deal as a soloist. Bonet and Kravitz eloped in 1987 and immediately had a child, the future actress Zoe Kravitz. Their bohemian existence was inspiring Lenny Kravitz to write more introspective, groovy hippie adjacent music like the trippy I Build this Garden for Us, I Build this Garden for Us. Or his smitten ode to Bonet, Flower Child. Spurred on by Lisa Bonet, Kravitz waited for a label that would allow him, like Prince, to not only record solo but also write, produce and play all the instruments. His self produced demos endured rejections from numerous labels. Some said Kravitz's music wasn't black enough, others not white enough. Before Kravitz finally played those demos for the relatively new label, Virgin America can.
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Make a Little Chance.
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The Virgin executives, hungry for a hit and willing to entertain left of center artists, told Kravitz they liked his Prince meets John Lennon sound. They let him turn his self recorded demos into a finished album. True to his neo hippie vibe, Lenny called the album Let Love Rule.
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We Got the Little.
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Lenny. Kravitz's debut arrived in September 1989 and took several months to break on the charts. Kravitz's music was indeed an odd fit for the pop or R B charts at the time, and so Virgin promoted him largely to rock radio stations. By the fall of 89, rock radio had bifurcated into album or mainstream rock, topped by such guitar hero veterans as the Rolling Stones, Aerosmith and Eric Clapton, And alternative or modern rock, home of the Cure, Kate bush and the B52s. It turned out that Lenny Kravitz's neo hippie rock worked on both sides of the rock radio D. Alternative stations slotted the trippy Let Love Rule next to the college rockers and their neo psychedelia, and mainstream rock stations could comfortably play Kravitz's 60s leaning jam alongside their boomer icons. By December, Let Love rule reach number four. Five on Billboard's Modern Rock chart and number 23 on the album Rock chart. Of course, for rock station programmers, it didn't hurt that Kravitz's music was so especially Beatlesque. So much so that almost immediately critics took potshots at Lenny for copying the sound of his elders. Beatle fans noticed right away that Let Love Rule the song was built out of the same chord progression as hey Jude, as illustrated by this 21st century YouTube mashup. Elsewhere on the album, Kravitz turned his admiration for the guitar work of Jimi Hendrix. Into the urbane Hendrix Reboot Mr. Cab Driver, a number 50 mainstream rock hit. This sonic familiarity was both blessing and curse for Kravitz, a curse with critics who gave Let Love Rule respectful but not ecstatic reviews. Rolling Stone categorized it as a quote, childlike musical collage of no particular point and a blessing with radio listeners who vibed on Kravitz's neo Hendrix style and embraced multiple tracks. I Build this Garden For Us followed Let Love Rule onto the modern rock chart, where it peaked at number 25. On the album chart. Let Love Rule was a sleeper hit, eventually reaching number 61 in February 1990. It would not be certified gold for another five years. As of 1990, though, it had done its job, establishing Kravitz as an intriguing personality and a promising singer songwriter who produced interesting if imitative tracks. But by the end of 1990, no one could have foreseen the cutting edge track Lenny would produce next, a chart topper for the world' biggest female pop star. Though his heart was in vintage rock, Kravitz had been paying attention to hip hop throughout the 80s, and one beat kept recurring as a sample on a slew of first wave rap hits. The monster drum break by Clyde stubblefield on James Brown's 1970 track Funky Drummer.
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1, 2, 3, 4 get it?
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In 1988, militant rap group Public Enemy slowed the funky drummer beat way down for their loping instrumental track Security of the First World. In the studio with his co producer Andre Betts, Kravitz had an idea of something he could do with that beat. At the time, Kravitz was also working with a poet and actress named Ingrid Chavez, who had just appeared in Prince's movie Graffiti Bridge and was starting to record music of her own that blended pop with spoken word poetry. Chavez wrote a poem for Kravitz, really an erotic love letter that he then paired with that James Brown by way of Public Enemy beat, plus some evocative synthesizers and the sound of his own wordless voice moaning in the background. Kravitz took the demo to a megastar he just met who was looking for new tracks to add to her upcoming Greatest Hits album. Her name, Madonna. Perhaps you didn't realize Lenny Kravitz, of all people, co wrote and produced Madonna's number one smash Justify My Love. We talked about it in our Madonna episode of Hit Parade. The hit parents it more famous for its video, which MTV banned, than for the song itself. Included on The Queen of Pop's late 1990 compilation the Immaculate Collection, Justify was an instant sensation thanks to its sex positive lyrics and queer friendly perspective. Very advanced for the time meeting.
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Waiting for you to justify my love.
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And thanks to Madonna selling Justify My Love as a video single on VHS, the song topped the Hot 100 in January 1991. It remains Lenny Kravitz's only number one pop hit as a writer and producer, by the way. Several years later, Ingrid Chavez sued for and won songwriting credit on Justify My Love. She claimed Kravitz hid her contributions out of fear that Lisa Bonet, his wife, would suspect him of having an affair with Chavez.
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I'm not like that.
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I don't want to be your mother in any case. Case Justify My Love affirmed Kravitz's versatility. His production employed the tools of hip hop and even anticipated the dance movement known as trip hop. And it belied his reputation as a hippie stuck in the past. Which was ironic, given the other side project he dropped at the end of January 1991, an unabashed exercise in hippie nostalgia.
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All we are saying is give peace of shame.
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As we discussed in our charity Mega Singles episode of Hit Parade, 1991's remake of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance, a benefit for Gulf war victims and an implied protest against that war, was the brainchild of Lenny Kravitz Kravitz teaming with the late Lennon's widow Yoko Ono and their 15 year old son Sean Ono Lennon, Lenny and Sean opened the video playing guitar side by side, and Kravitz's voice is one of the first you hear on the.
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Children.
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Credited to the Peace Choir. The new Give Peace A Chance Featured more than 40 eclectic acts from MC Hammer to Axl Rose to Peter Gabriel to Iggy pop to Michael McDonald. Though the new recording was more well intentioned than good, it did crack the Hot 100, peaking at number 54 and it solidified Lenny's reputation as Gen X premier boomer rock nostalgist. Kravitz built on that brand on his 1991 sophomore album titled Mama Said, which kicked off with a blast of uncut vintage style funk rock. Always on the Run was perhaps Lenny Kravitz's savviest single yet, rebooting and blending multiple strains of rock history. Its fuzzy funky groove directly recalled the sound of Sly and the Family Stone, But its primary riff was played by a modern guitar luminary, Saul Hudson, better known as Slash from Guns N Roses. In interviews, Slash, who like Kravitz is biracial, spoke highly of working with Lenny and said Always on the Run gave him the chance to play with more funk than he normally did on GnR's recordings. On the song's bridge, Lenny even calls Slash out by name. Always on the Run handily reintroduced Lenny Kravitz, peaking at number eight on the Modern Rock Chart chart and number 40 on the Album Rock Chart in the spring of 91. Having re established his rock credibility, Kravitz's next move was another head fake, his first ever pop and R B hit in a completely different retro style, Written as a plea by Kravitz to wife Lisa Bonet as their marriage was foundering. It Ain't Over Till it's over was Lenny in 70s fluttery slow jam mode. The string arrangement, sitar solo and Kravitz's falsetto vocal recalled the sound of peak Philly soul a la the Spinners or the Stylistic you're a Genie in the.
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Sky.
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And the song's plush melody echoed the lilting funkin bee of Earth, Wind and fire, directly recalling EWF's that's the way of the World. For all its backward looking nostalgia, in a way it ain't over till it's over was ahead of the curve for 91, kicking off the 20 year nostalgia cycle for 70s culture before the rest of 90s popular culture began mining the disco decade for sounds and fashions.
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So much pain inside baby it ain't over till it's over.
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Prior to this song, Kravitz had only ever made the Hot 100 once, taking Let Love Rule to a lowly number 89. But it ain't over gave Virgin a song they could take to pop and R B stations. It climbed all the way to number two on the Hot 100 in August of 91 and hit number 10 on the R B chart a month later. Lenny Kravitz, rock star, was finally a pop hit maker. The Mama said album generated a minor pop follow up hit with the Lennon esque Stand by My Woman and it went gold by the fall of 91. Four years later, Mama said was certified platinum. Kravitz had now scored with groovy psychedelia, strutting funk and retro soul and he'd produced a smash for Madonna. But he had yet to go to number one on any Billboard chart as a frontline artist or produce a galvanizing riff rocker. In 1993, Kravitz checked all those boxes. Are you gonna go my way? Was Lenny Kravitz's bid for air guitar immortality built out of a riff worthy of Jimi Hendrix. Numerous, numerous critics pointed out its echoes of Hendrix, but virtually all were positive on the track. One scribe called it quote, a rollicking, fast paced rock masterpiece that shows Lenny's mastery of a catchy riff. It's music video directed by filmmaker Mark Romanock in a multi tiered rotunda with flashing lights and dozens of thrashing dancers presenting Kravitz as a guitar icon. Later that year it would take home an MTV Video Music Award. At a time when songs by black artists rarely topped mainstream rock radio playlists Cross Kravitz's Are you gonna go My Way? Did the Improbable, climbing all the way to number one on the album rock chart in the early summer of 93. It also reached number two on the modern rock chart, a rare Kravitz hit that did a little better with mainstream rock fans than alt rock listeners. The Are youe Gonna Go My Way? Album climbed to number 12 and became the first Kravitz LP to go platinum right away. Kravitz filled the album with riff rockers like Is There Any Love in youn heart? A top 20 album rock hit, And the anthemic Believe, whose melody was once again compared to the Beatles and its string coda to Derek and the Dominoes. Layla. Believe returned Kravitz to the modern rock top 10, as well as reaching number 60 on the Hot 100, Kravitz was now crossing over at multiple formats. His melancholy soul ballad Heaven Help. Cracked the lower rungs of both the Hot 100 and the R B chart. Six years later, it was even covered by neo soul singer Angie Stone. But one Once Kravitz recognized that guitar riffs were his most profitable lane, he spent the rest of the decade trying to find new ones. He kicked off his 1995 album Circus with the tongue in cheek Rock and roll is Dead, which despite its snarky title, cracked the top 10 at both mainstream and modern rock Stat.
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Rock and roll is Dead.
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What made Rock and Roll is Dead doubly ironic was that Kravitz borrowed the riff from one of the most iconic classic rock songs of all time, Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker. So even in pure rock mode, Kravitz was trying on different rocker disguises. On 1996's can't get you off my mind, a number 62 pop hit, Kravitz tried his hand at country rock, combining his riffage with a lonely highway lyric.
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And I just can't get you off of my mind. Yeah.
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Kravitz was seriously wounded when he wrote the song, as he was still grieving the 1993 end of his marriage to Lisa Bonet and watching his mother, Roxy Roker, lose her fight with breast cancer. Roker died in December 1995. On the charts, neither single from Lenny's Circus album came close to the top 40, and the album only went gold, suggesting that Kravitz's hit Making Days were on the wane. The trend seemed to persist with his fifth album, 1998's Five, on which Lenny played with sequencers and samplers for the first time since Justify My Love. The lead single if youf can't say no echoed that Madonna hit's trip hop sound, but only managed to reach number 39 on the modern rock chart. The five album opened weekly, muddled around the middle of the album chart for months, and took half a year to even go gold. Reviews were also unkind as critics began to tire of Kravitz's game of musical dress up. AllMusic wrote quote Kravitz's sly Hendrix, Lennon and Prince pastiches are a bore. Unquote5 seemed commercially defunct until Kravitz decided to try promoting a track he had added to the album at the very last minute. It one he had to push Virgin Records to include on the CD Buried on the disc's back Half it was a funk rocker fusing the sound of prime Parliament Funkadelic with classic rock riffage and a simple singalong pop chorus. Lenny called it Fly Away. Flyaway reintroduced Kravitz to both rock and pop audiences. It took four months to climb the mainstream rock chart and three months to scale the modern rock chart. By November 1998, Flyaway had reached number one on both rock charts simultaneously, Kravitz's only single to do so. A few weeks later, Flyaway began crossing over to top 40 stations, helped along by its inclusion on the first edition of the now that's what I Call Music CD series. Alongside pop hits by Hanson and the Backstreet Boys, Fly Away climbed the Hot 100 for five months, eventually topping out at number 12 in May of 1999. Kravitz's first major pop hit since It Ain't Over Till it's over in 1991. The chameleon had fused all of his influences rock, funk, soul, pop, even a little grunge into a smash that that sounded mostly like Lenny Kravitz. Thanks to Fly Away, five climbed back up the album chart, hitting a new peak of number 28 and going double platinum. Moving quickly to solidify his restored chart status, Kravitz and Virgin reissued the CD in 1999 with a bonus track Kravitz recorded for the soundtrack to the second Austin Powers movie. Only this time, Lenny didn't adapt a style. He borrowed a song wholesale.
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American Woman, Stay Away From Me, American Woman, Mama Let Me Be.
- [53:50]
A
American Woman was a number one hit in 1970 for Canadian band the Guess who. Lenny did a straight up cover of the track, retaining its crunchy riff and adding the same late 90s sheen he'd added to Fly. Lenny's American Woman hit the top 10 on both rock charts. And thanks to its inclusion on the reissued 5 CD, that album would go on to spend 110 weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, by far the longest run of any Kravitz album. Just a few months after five finally fell off in the the fall of 2000, Virgin collected all of Kravitz's singles on a greatest hits cd. In a sign of the goodwill Kravitz had built up over the past decade, Greatest Hits debuted all the way up at number two, Lenny's highest charting album ever. And like Madonna on the Immaculate Collection a decade earlier, Lenny anchored his hits compilation with a romantic new song. The Heartfelt Again was the single that showed Lenny Kravitz music had finally become its own genre. It sounded like Beatlesque classic rom crossed with neo soul, but it was indebted to no.1 style. By February 2001 again had risen to number four on the Hot 100, pushing greatest hits to triple platinum sales. It made sense that for an artist as varied as Lenny Kravitz, a hits compilation would become his top seller. Kravitz spent the rest of the aughts recording and releasing music that charted respectably. Dig in from 2001's Lenny album cracked the top 40 at number 31 and the album went platinum. In 2004, Kravitz tried his hand again at hip hop, teaming with rapper Jay Z on Storm, which made the top half of Billboard's R B hip hop chart. And in 2005, a return to Riff Rock on Lady gave Kravitz one more top 40 pop hit, peaking at number 27. In 2008, Justice Kravitz was making the Hot 100 for what would turn out to be the last time with the number 73 hit I'll be Waiting.
- [57:23]
B
Be waiting as Long as I'm breathing.
- [57:28]
A
A 22 year old singer songwriter who had moved to LA to find fortune in the music business was recording a demo for what would turn out to be his first hit. It would not be the song to make Bruno Mars a household name, but it would kick off a run by a performer with an even more eclectic sonic career than Lenny Kravitz. When we come back, Bruno builds his very own unorthodox jukebox by proving he could write and sing in virtually any style. Don't believe him, just watch. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfi. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis, Derek John is Executive Producer of Narrative Podcasts and Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can support subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the Hit Parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one I'm Chris Melanfi.
- [59:10]
B
You try too hard but girl, you make me nervous. But now you should have noticed me. And what will it take?