Black And White America

Most people would have to agree it’s a good thing Lenny Kravitz is out there, carrying the torch for unreconstructed, crotch-waggling man-rock. With the record industry entering its end of days phase, sales so in the gutter that career schmindies such as The Decemberists and Wilco are able to top the charts whilst shifting exactly the same number of units they were a decade ago, it’s useful to be reminded what a proper rock star used to look like.
The last true, non-mummified rocker left in the wild, Kravitz isn’t a holdout – he’s a living fossil, a throwback to the time before irony when a musician could rhyme ‘maybe’ with ‘baby’ confident nobody would point, laugh and tweet their disdain. What stripe of arena uber-lord would you prefer? Kravitz in head to toe leather giving it the full Hendrix or Win Butler dressed like an Amish wedding singer scowling as he contemplates his mandolin? Because that, people, is the cast of things to come.

Chiseled, tattooed and lady-killing, there is little danger of Kravitz being mistaken for the bass player from The National. Musically, he veers from overblown to wildly preposterous but does so with such an easy confidence (and unimpeachable chops) that pointing out the silliness of it all isn’t just beside point – it’s missing the point entirely. Of course, if you’re here to giggle, his seventh studio album contains much that is chortle-worthy. Skipping from the most unsubtle disco-funk breakdowns this side of a Bee Gees tribute band to plastic soul that doesn’t so much sex you up as grope you on the way back from the loo to ‘issue’ rock which biffs you over the head with a placard, for sure nothing on Black and White America is going to bag any gongs for graceful understatement.

Then again, phooey to graceful understatement. Mostly written on the Bahama beach where Kravitz goes to ‘find himself’ and squeezed between his gigs as actor, photographer and, yes, interior designer (he’s about to oversee the outfitting of a Phillipe Starck designed boutique hotel in Miami if you’re in the neighborhood), Black and White America is the kind of mega indulgence only a millionaire rock star with a committed fan-base could get away with in 2011. It’s hooky and eager to please but at the same time utterly in love with itself, a concept record where the overarching theme is what a whizz-bang studio genius Kravitz is. It doesn’t wink or apologize for its excesses. If you’re not on board, Kravitz as much as says, you know where the exit signs lead.

It opens with a blistering title track, a contemplation of a post-Obama USA filtered through the lense of Kravitz’s own multi-racial upbringing. Raised by a white father and a black mother, he recounts the racial slurs being tossed at his parents in the early 60s (and this was New York city rather than the deep South). Partnered with a groin-thrusting selection of his best reheated Hendrix riffs, the track is as much a plea for an idealistic future as a summation of where America is now; though delivered with all the tasteful nuance of the final 20 minutes of Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon the yearning sincerity is surprisingly moving.
Soon afterwards, he’s slipping out of his biker leathers and into something more comfortable (we’re guessing velvet dressing gown and thong). Recorded in Paris, ‘Liquid Jesus’ channels Eurovision naff and seventies cod-soul, and would be a retro mess were it not for Kravitz’s smokey vocals. From there, it’s time to rifle the rolodex as Jay-Z pops up to drop a verse on ‘Boongie Drop’, a tribute to large bottomed Caribbean womanhood and Drake chips with some rhymes on ‘Sunflower’, a co-write with Alicia Key’s other half, Swizz Beatz.

Twenty years after Nevermind it is more than slightly ridiculous that a rock star so extravagantly primordial as Kravitz is still flexing his musical pecs. On the other hand, how dreary the world would be if the super-sincere and cripplingly self-aware had the arena to themselves. Black and White America is pompous and rigidly old-fashioned. In flashes, however, it is also tremendous fun – a stand-up hoot, no less. Remember when that was all you wanted from a record?