The one thing you can’t accuse Lenny Kravitz of lacking is taste. The man knows his classic rock cold, amassing and polishing riffs and strategies with the passion of a collector. Hell, even the background music that preceded his entrance Thursday night at Nokia Theatre — a mix of Malian music, free jazz, Krautrock and intense gospel chants — showed a real connoisseur’s touch.
This probably makes him a great guy to take record shopping, or hang out with and share favorite songs. What it does not make him is an especially interesting musician.
You never get the sense that he’s taking his wide and deep knowledge and synthesizing it into something new; after 22 years, Kravitz remains a gifted student. He’s a human sampler, a craftsman that lacks the imagination to be a true artist. If you needed someone to make you a copy of that Hendrix bootleg you lost in college, he’s your man, just as long as you don’t expect it to have the soul and value of the original.
With Black and White America, his most recent album, Kravitz has shifted his interests from the late ’60s/early ’70s to the mid/late ’70s. This means there are touches of Funkadelic, David Bowie and the earliest new wave bands, but the results are just as superficial, cold and predetermined as before.
His vision just won’t allow any of the messiness and boundary-stretching and that made the originals so exciting. His entire 75-minute set (followed by a 15-minute encore) felt secondhand: Every song hit its mark yet he never once landed a punch.
If you’re going to steal from Bowie and Roxy Music, it might be a good idea to cover your tracks, not sing the verses in your Bowie voice and the chorus like Bryan Ferry. An even better idea: Don’t make the song’s title — “Rock Star City Line” — a mash-up of their song titles. Also, coupling the bluesy “Mr. Cab Driver” with a Miles Davis-cool trumpet solo would be infinitely more exciting if you hadn’t been making that move for years, to say nothing of originally copping the idea from a Bill Graham booking at the Fillmore East.
Even when he tries to make a statement, Kravitz shies away from going too deep. You would think that as the child of an interracial marriage, he would have a unique perspective on how race is experienced today. But the song “Black and White America” settles for an anodyne message of “gee, isn’t it great we’ve come so far.”
To be fair, Kravitz is a damn fine mimic, and he’s assembled a great band to back him. (Any band that features Gail Ann Dorsey on bass is going to have a dynamic, rock-solid bottom.) But he keeps his players on a tight leash — even when they build to a rave-up for “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” it feels controlled, the noise measured out in teaspoons.
It’s also performed with an arrogance it hasn’t earned. (Opener Raphael Saadiq can be just as derivative — his “Heart Attack” is a dead ringer for Jr. Walker and the All Stars’ “Shotgun” — but he brought a showman’s joy to his set that made it far more palatable.) The lights and sound are also first-rate, but by the end of the evening it hits you: the sharply angled geometric figures that make up the video screen are arrayed so they look just like the mountains on a Coors beer label.
That isn’t an inappropriate comparison: Kravitz has much the same relationship to music that Coors has to beer. Both would like you to think they’re refreshing, but are actually a weak, commercially produced substitute, good only when the real thing is not available.
Photo, from a December performance in Germany, by Sascha Baumann, Getty Images.
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Live review: Lenny Kravitz at Nokia Theatre is a post from: Soundcheck
