INTRO| FROM THE EDITOR
SOME MUSICALartists capture the zeitgeist. Others do their own thing and tap into something deeper than prevailing trends, threading their creativity to the wires of memory deep within our temporal lobes.
Lenny Kravitz is that other artist: a songwriter, guitarist and cultural force who delivers another blast of his singular musical vision every few years to remind us that music can be rocking, soulful, modern, vintage and magnificently original, and connect with us more deeply than the current vogue.
I recall when his breakthrough track “Are You Gonna Go My Way” began blasting out of radios, and I can vividly remember its music video, which was in regular rotation on MTV. The year was 1993, and grunge was at its height. Another young artist looking for a career-changing hit might have slipped into a flannel shirt, downtuned his guitar and howled his lyrics over a sludgy rhythm bed. Instead, Lenny conjured up a classic rock–inspired track that wouldn’t have felt out of place in 1975. And, remarkably, it didn’t feel anachronistic in 1993. MTV deserves some credit for that. Its genre-blending video programming exposed viewers to music ranging from pop to soul to rap to grunge and hardcore. In that wild videosphere, a blues-rock burner like “Are You Gonna Go My Way” wasn’t going to seem amiss.
But ultimately the reason that song, and Lenny, became such a hit was because he tapped into the rhythms, sounds and styles that are at the root of classic rock, which is itself a stew of rock and roll, blues, funk and soul — genres that are close to his musical heart and our own. There was, of course, nothing new about that where Lenny was concerned. Since his 1989 debut album, Let Love Rule, he’s mixed the genres that influenced him as the son of a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Black mother. From Duke Ellington to the Jackson 5 to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Kiss and Pink Floyd — it’s all there in the grooves of his albums, created by a man who understands, and helps us remember, tha
