Wearing his musical influences as proudly as he flaunted his hip-hugging bell-bottoms and mirrored specs, Lenny Kravitz at first seemed like just another fashion dread wishing he'd been of age during the Summer of Love. Riff for feedbacked riff, Kravitz's songs weren't so much songs as ideas for songs about the late-Sixties and early-Seventies rock and soul that defined the era. Call it
deja entendu;
you'd heard it before. And without the revolutionary cultural happenings that bolstered the soundtrack of those times, his wide-eyed, shortsighted homages seemed quaint and hollow. Which makes
Are You Gonna Go My Way,
Kravitz's third album, all the more surprising: Sly, confident and restlessly bold in spots, it transcends its influences without leaving them completely behind.
Granted, "Believe" has a string-laden "Layla"-like coda, and most of the album's first half quickly slides out of memory (or into memory, if you're inclined to play catch the reference). Its second half, however, finds Kravitz closest to the company he'd like to keep. Jimi and John would be proud of the four-song suite that begins with the surprising racial straightforwardness of "Black Girl" and ends with the austerely moving "Sister."
Lyrics have never been Kravitz's strong point, but these four songs (also including "My Love" and "Sugar") find in their relative simplicity an honest optimism about love and relationships not found in his more anthemlike "All You Need Is..." songs. When he sings, "Black girls have got to be strong. You're just gonna make it fine," in that slur style that Hendrix made irresistible, Kravitz reveals his own emotions under someone else's voice. The gyrating, Bo Diddley-ish twang of "My Love" finds Kravitz digging deep into his bag of hand-me-downs and coming up amazingly fresh and cogent. He sounds mystical rather than mystified by the power of his sources. And "Sugar," straight out of early-Seventies funk, proves that Kravitz is most successful at the groovy bass-and-horn-driven style of the Isley Brothers and Curtis Mayfield. "I'm coming home, I'm oh so low, I need you baby," sings Kravitz, and you believe him as sexual provocateur and as a musically wild, black bad boy, arriving, as old black women will call it, on the shores of home.
"Sister" finds him at play in an acoustic field of real, not borrowed, feelings. Cradled in a tale of misplaced love, "Sister" is a bong-lit beauty that revels in its own emotional nakedness. When the martial rhythm of the drums bumps against sad violins and Kravitz's own moan, you hear a man who's lost a love but found himself. "If they knock on your door, you already gave," he sings.
From the sound of him, Lenny Kravitz has found a space to be himself. Funny how another black boy (named Prince) also found the same kind of musical independence on
his
third album on a song called "Sister." Hmm…