Lenny Kravitz "It Ain't Over Till Its Over" yeah or nay?
downtownrobbrown
446 Posts
SSIA. I told this girl at work today "You know Lenny Kravitz didn't always suck that bad". She was shocked.
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Funny i was just in J&R Music worlds vinyl section and saw some recent album by him. Im curious to what hes doing now but i lost him around the Puffy collabos.
Yeah, im trying to rack my brain to think what in 1991 was doin the Retro Soul thang which Kravitz was already well oiled in doing with Rock.
He didnt get no Black radio with that shit...IIRC. But i do recall BET love.
It aint over might be an underappreciated monster and before its time.
Seriously. This thread is embarrassing.
Kindly,
parallax
Nah.
First heard this on Vinroc's So Much Soul vol.2 (kills it on the mellow-play-w/-yr-girl-tip).
In 2012, a 60s Retro Flower Rock album wouldnt move shit.
And lets be real. New Jack Swing, R&B, House, and Hip Hop werent competing against Kravitz.
He was marketed to the White Rock crowd(live Jimi was), despite the mixed kid Jefferson's backstory.
Feather boa, my arse.
On the other hand, I heard a fairly recent Lenny album in a gym once, that was really painful. EVERY song sounded like a cover of a classic rock song, with new terrible lyrics. Only good for playing "spot the chord progression".
The Lisa Bonet thing notwithstanding, that's the issue I've always had with him - dude has never had an original idea in his life. His repertoire reads like a rap-sheet of lame knock-offs; Lennon, Costello, Smokey, Curtis, Zeppelin, the Chilli Peppers, and so on. I mean, I know rock music is often derivative by definition, but Kravitz abuses the privilege.
Why does Led Zepp get a pass for rip offs and considered a great group but Lenny isnt given the pass.
Zepp doesnt/hasnt abuse the "privilege"?
no props to him though if he cheated on lisa bonet.
1 - They haven't gotten a pass, they've been slagged/sued numerous times for this.
2 - They kick Lenny's ass to the moon and back ten times over.
3 - Unlike Lenny, they also did a lot of truly original stuff and basically invented a certain sound.
but its always good to hear your advice and thoughts on dealing with the womens
Hey, it's a fuck or be fucked kinda world we live in. GET FAMILIAR!
And that's where babies come from.
I don't know that Zeppelin do get a pass. There's never been a shortage of people pointing out what they owe to Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly, Bukka White, Willie Dixon, Bert Jansch, Memphis Minnie, Jake Holmes and so on. People used to say that shit about them all the time when I was a kid, and that was a long fucking time ago, long before the days of internet smartasses.
What they did do that Kravitz doesn't was to add a dimension of their own to those bites, even the most blatant - several dimensions, in some cases. They brought something new and original to the party in terms of their approach. I'd be interested in someone playing Zeppelin's In My Time Of Dying back-to-back with the Blind Willie Johnson song that it supposedly rips off, and pointing out exactly what it was that Zeppelin stole, never mind making a case for the extent to which the Zep song would be diminished if you took those elements away. In the case of a song like Nobody's Fault But Mine, it's a little less uncertain but even then, the Zeppelin "version" is as much an adaptation of the form as the song. As an idiom, the blues tends to follow a few well-established, simple and often traditional patterns, and of course there's a vast amount of rock music that's built upon variations and mutations of those patterns. Moreover, authorship of a lot of that shit is far from clear-cut to begin with. You can find a whole bunch of these compare-and-contrast Led Zeppelin plagiarism clips on YouTube, and some of them are really stretching it. The concept of prior art isn't limited solely to patent law.
A song like It Ain't Over Til It's Over, on the other hand, is almost wholly dependent upon a bunch of familiar stylistic devices designed to trigger a particular kind of nostalgic response; "Hey, that Lenny Kravitz song is really cool - it sounds just like a Smokey Robinson song!" This begs the question; why not listen to Smokey, then? Why waste your time listening to some hack's idea of what a Smokey Robinson song would sound like if Smokey still wanted to write the kind of songs he wrote fifteen years earlier? It's that kind of credibility-by-association bullshit that Kravitz has built his entire career upon. What Zeppelin did was, in many cases, massively unethical at the very least, but their work never stood or fell on some Wonder Years shit.