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HE SOLD EIGHT MILLION COPIES OF HIS GREATEST HITS RECORD
LAST YEAR. HE WAS ALSO MISTAKEN FOR A BANK ROBBER. LENNY KRAVITZ CONTINUES
TO BALANCE THE LABELS OF 'ROCK STAR' AND 'BLACK MAN' ON LENNY.
- By Sean Plummer
Harbour Island, Bahamas — The sands of Harbour Island are pink.
The water is blue. It’s a tiny place. Length: five miles. Width:
one mile. It lies off the northern coast of Eleuthera. Rum flowed here
during Prohibition. Now it’s turning into a tourist trap craaazy
fast.
Directions: get on the ferry at Tree Island Dock in Nassau
(departure time: 8 am). Travel time: two hours. The ferry service began
last year. Some locals love it. Many don’t. Tourists spend American
dollars (good) but property values have gone clear blue sky high (bad).
Foreigners buy beachfront homes and hire locals to clean their toilets
and cook their meals. Young islanders are looking to buy property on
the south islands. Foreigners will come eventually and when they do,
they’ll pay. Big time.
Lenny Kravitz doesn’t own a house here. He has a shack on a nearby
island. He writes songs there. He vacations with his daughter. He chills.
He first came to the Bahamas when he was five. His grandfather
was from Inauga, the closest Bahamian island to Cuba. He came down to
visit family at Christmas and other holidays.
Today he is doing Canadian press at a friend’s beachfront
house in Dunmore Town. Palm trees sway. Salamanders motor across the
floor. Coconut milk, half sweet/half sour, is served. The sun coaxes
melanoma.
Lenny has finished a new album called Lenny. It’s out
October 30. He recorded it in Miami. Miami is where the cops pulled
Lenny over last November. They thought he robbed a bank. A bank employee
said it wasn’t him. MTV asked if he was ‘racial profiled.’
Lenny wasn’t sure. He wrote a song about it called ‘Bank Robber
Man’.
Lenny is Lenny’s sixth album. It’s rock
that doesn’t forget to roll. It’s surefire. It’s slicker
than shit through a goose.
Lenny is doing okay. His Greatest Hits album sold
eight million copies. He just re-upped his contract with Virgin Records.
He wrote a song with Mick Jagger for his new album. Michael Jackson
had him play guitar at his own tribute concert in September. Lenny
is going to make Lenny a lot of money.
Lenny isn’t a talkative guy. He holds his cards,
as they say, close to his chest. He likes talking about the Bahamas.
He likes talking about how the music industry is fucking itself by spending
money on no-talents who can’t write their own music.
He misses his mom. She died six years ago this December.
Breast cancer. Her name was Roxie Roker and she played Helen Willis
on TV’s The Jeffersons. He loves his daughter Zoe. She’s
12 years old and goes to school in Miami. Her mother is Lisa Bonet.
Lisa divorced Lenny in 1993 after he screwed around on her on tour.
He wrote his second album, Mama Said (1991), to get her back.
It didn’t work. They’re still good friends. He’s been
linked to Vanessa Paradis, Natalie Imbruglia and Madonna. He’s
37 years old. He doesn’t look it. He’s a rock star. He looks
it.
Is your shack a good place to create?
Yeah. I’ve written a lot of songs in there. I wrote a lot of the
new record in there. I didn’t come down here to write. I was just
here chilling out. I was in the shack, just an acoustic guitar and just
started playing.
Is your anonymity here in the Bahamas good for your creativity?
That’s the great thing about here. I don’t have to do any
of that. I’m just a local. And tourists do come around and they
ask locals ‘where am I, what’s goin’ on?’ They’re
like ‘Oh, him? You’re looking for him?’ And they’ll
ask ‘What’s he like?’ ‘Lenny? He walks around with
no shoes, wears the same clothes every day.’ They don’t think
of me as anything but just this local guy who hangs out. It’s really
nice and it’s important to have that somewhere in the world where
I can do that.
How has your appreciation of the attention — from fans and from
the media — changed from the start of your career to now?
When I started out it was a gradual thing. I remember on my second album
still taking the subway to the studio, on Mama Said. And it wasn’t
‘til [my third album] Are You Gonna Go My Way? that I got
a Volkswägen camper bus and I started driving to the studio. But
it was a slow thing, and it kept building and building as each album
went on. Now it’s crazy.
As much as it’s hard to deal with, at the same
time it’s nice to know that that many people enjoy your music.
And everything comes with something so this is what comes with being
a popular musician. So I accept it and I deal with it.
There seems to be a slight return in rock & roll to the values
of bands starting off small and building up an audience from album to
album. Whereas in the last couple of years, pop artists have emerged
wholly formed.
Boom! Just, boom, on the scene. And there’s no artist development.
I find that’s missing from the music business. When you think back
to say someone like Aretha Franklin or a Ray Charles, I bet there’s
still Aretha Franklin or Ray Charles albums that you don’t know
about because there was an album where he sang some country songs or
there’s an album... with an orchestra, and they didn’t all
do well. But it was about developing an artist and... having them try
new things. And there’s none of that anymore. It’s absolutely
just ‘Okay, we need to sell 50 million records the first time out’,
and then, boom, these people are just megastars overnight. Which is
fine, but for me that’s not the way I want it to go. I would hate
to have a career that lasted two, three, four years and then it’s
over.
Why is that happening?
I think that the priorities have changed. It’s all about selling.
It’s all about making money. It’s now so corporate that they’re
products. So when you put [out] your new line of candy bar or deodorant
or whatever, you want that thing to sell from the jump. You don’t
want it to ease into it: ‘new improved soad suds!’ It’s
got to sell now.
And the music’s the same way. They’re putting
up money behind artists, they want their investment back. They want
to make a lot of money. It’s big, big business. It’s always
been a business but it’s just like this huge corporate gigantic
business, and it’s about selling. It’s not about music.
Do you find it hard to find people in the music business who still care
about music?
A lot of them do. A lot of them underneath wish that it was more about
music in the way that it used to be. But a lot of people just accept
that it’s changed.
Does music do the same thing for you now that it did when you started
out? Is it therapeutic?
Completely. It’s still the same. Hasn’t changed. That’s
what it’s for. I don’t do this to be a rock star or whatever,
I do it to express myself, and it’s still exactly what it was.
Tell me about ‘Bank Robber Man’. Did you feel like it was
about racial profiling?
It’s hard to say because I was told that the description of the
assailant was pretty much matching up with the way I looked. But I don’t
know... because the description was completely what I was wearing, my
skin tone, my hair, everything. I don’t know. But it was a really
bad... It wasn’t bad — it was an experience.
Sounds kind of sureal.
Yeah, it was very surreal. It was this trip. And I was cool about it,
I didn’t dig deeper and try to make a court case. I let it go,
man, and I got a song out of it.
You are of mixed parentage but you look black, not white. Have things
gotten better racially in America since you grew up? Are the same prejudices
there?
They’re there. They might be more buried but they’re still
there. I think with each generation it gets a little better but it’s
still there. There’s still a lot of young kids who have racist
attitudes, and that’s kind of sad. And there’s a lot of blending
going on, too.
It seems like hip-hop is really crossing over colour lines now.
Oh, it’s everwhere. Exactly. It’s the same thing rock &
roll did.
Is that a good thing? Because rock & roll originally came out
of the blues — a black form of music.
Yeah, then white people adapted it, took on the music, the lifestyle,
the look, the lingo, everything. And hip-hop’s doing the same.
It’s all over the world anywhere you go. You can go to Japan and
find kids like ‘Yo, whassup?’, and the whole deal.
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