Lenny Kravitz: Mama Said: Retrostalgia
My love and discomfort with Lenny's best album.
Nostalgia
Mama Said was released 33 years ago. This was an important album for my friends and me. Music was beginning to open itself up to us, prompting exploration in every direction and sound. Yes we might've smoked a few joints to this album. Yes we played the Influence Game with it: that's The Beatles, that's Lennon, that's Curtis, that's Hendrix. And yes we just loved The Sound of the album, if only to say Wow, you can really put bass into music again. That was significant. Still is significant.
Retro
Kravitz loves music from the 60s and 70s and wears those influences proudly. But his strength is sounding era-appropriate. Looking back, he laid one of the first pillars in what's now an industry: retro sound. As a champion of analogue recording methods (tape, valves, vintage gear), Lenny anticipated the digital era's hunger for authentically analogue sounds. Note the insane prices for vintage guitars, vintage EQs and recording desks, or any gear that was used in the golden age of rock and roll. Note that Lenny uses one of the consoles from Abbey Road. And note how modern music production software is obsessed with emulations of vintage gear. Vintage = authentic.
Lenny first normalised this aesthetic.
Nostalgia
I saw Lenny twice, back to back, at Entertainment Centre gigs on the Are You Gonna Go My Way tour in the 90s. The gigs were fine, but they were identical. Same set list, same crap arena sound (despite the number of vintage amps on stage, each with the same retro ribbon mic), the same guitar gestures and most tellingly, the same between-song banter. Same hippy messages on love and coming together. Now I know shows are shows, played as they're rehearsed, planned packages, finished on the dot. But the cookie-cutter aspect of it deflated me. It's like I was watching a facsimile the second time around; a product-show rather than a dynamic, open and unpredictable experience.
Retro
I have a deep respect for Lenny as a musician and producer. In terms of all the rock star poses, model girlfriends, clothing lines and the cheek of his My tk421 video — meh, that's all rock star hoo-ha to me. But in terms of getting those 'authentic' analogue sounds, well that still tweaks my interest.
Lenny must be sick of pundits playing the Influence Game with him, saying Oh you sound just like Curtis/Smokey/Jimi etc. I'm sure Lenny's engineer Henry Hirsch gets sick of that retro-obsession too, the assumption that everything was better in the past because it used vintage A, B and C gear. Even if that (ironically) showed great foresight to do so.
And you could respond: Well then why did Lenny use Curtis Mayfield's bass player (LeBron Scott) on What Goes Around Comes Around, and opt for the most direct lineage possible by co-writing & playing the Lennon-esque All I Ever Wanted with Sean Lennon? How close do you want to play this game?
Nostalgia
All of this is moot, ultimately, when you consider how great the songs are. I come back to Mama Said every couple of years; I get annoyed by it, then I re-dig particular tracks like the timeless More Than Anything In This World. There's a simplicity, an earthy-rounded-warm soul sound that's appealing partly because it's so the opposite of current pop.
As pop songs, they're still totally successful. As a lyricist, I can't say Lenny has much to say beyond hippy bromides and sub-earnest entreaties to come together — and I wish he'd find a better collaborator on that front.
And if I had to reiterate another no-doubt-irritatingly-obvious opinion, I'd say that Lenny writes best under conditions of heartbreak. Mama Said is great largely because it is a breakup album suffused with genuine emotion. Cue 80s-90s nostalgia moment for Gen X males at the mention of Lisa Bonet.
Retro
If Lenny can dial in backward-looking homage at the drop of a hat, is that sustainable as a songwriter-producer-musician going forward? Can that become influential in its own way, or is it always the 70s in this retroactive bubble? Are you a Lenny fan or would it be more accurate to call you a Curtis fan? What does artistic growth and development mean here? More of the same? Is this a package sound?
But also notice how 'retro' is everywhere now: cameras, kitchen appliances, motorcycles, glasses, watches, clothes... anything collectable, curated and smudged with vague 'authenticity' is hip and legit. A look, an intent, a knowing sign.
Nostalgia
Lenny pre-empted (with perfect timing) the onset of boomer Nostalgia for the Classic Rock Sound. And he also showed us how limiting that nostalgia is when extrapolated at industrial, late-capitalist scale. Think of the prevalence of greatest hits radio, investment companies buying up classic song catalogues, and the bizarre ongoing viability of rock acts like the Stones, Queen, Creedence. Eventually, culturally, you run out of source material, you start repackaging the same again and again (box sets, remastered editions, new spatial mixes). You pander to the ageing audience by serving them their youth and selling shit with their ageing soundtracks.
Yes, Lenny is ageing beautifully, and he's still making music, but I can't help thinking it all feeds in to the nostalgia industry now.
He reminds me we're living in a William Gibson world called the Infinite Now — where the artefacts of the past are the nurtured & reassuring icons of truth & certainty in an uncertain & changing world. Where there's curiously no sense of the future because the past is stuck on repeat.
Maybe 'Retropy' would be a more descriptive term here...
Thoughts, comments?