[large]Lenny Kravitz a one-man gang [/large]

Growing up in America was never as simple as black and white for Lenny Kravitz.

As the child of African-American actress Roxie Roker and Jewish TV producer Sy Kravitz, Lenny says he didn’t totally fit with any group.

But he wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Because I didn’t belong anywhere, I belonged everywhere,” the 47-year- old musician explains. “And I was comfortable with that.

“When you go to school — elementary school, junior high, high school — there tend to be cliques. In L.A., we had Mexican kids, black kids, rocker kids who listened to Zeppelin and Floyd, nerdy kids that were really smart, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, the surfers, whoever.

During lunch, these cliques would hang together. And basically, I walked through all of them. I had friends in all of them. I was the kid that was just moving around — one day I’m over here, one day I’m over there. That’s just the way I grew up.”

It’s also the way he’s made music. Since his 1989 debut Let Love Rule, Kravitz has blurred the lines between genres, blending rock, funk, soul, pop and more into a personal hybrid that sounds classic and contemporary at once. His plus-sized ninth album Black and White America plays both sides of the fence once again, getting down on the good foot with a heavy dose of old-school funk inspired by James Brown, The Brothers Johnson and Earth, Wind and Fire — while still keeping the other shoe firmly planted in the power-chord rock and pop of the ’70s.

Between rehearsing his band and shooting the film The Hunger Games, Kravitz filled me in Negrophilia, how funky he’d be in Antarctica and why there’s no grey area when inspiration strikes.

There’s been talk for years about you making an old-school funk album called Negrophilia. Did this grow from that?

No, that’s wrong information on the Internet which I wish would go away. This has nothing to do with Negrophilia. This is brand new. When I went home to The Bahamas, I thought I was going to finish Negrophilia. Instead, I started a new album. But a story got out and now everyone thinks this is that record. It’s not. This is all fresh stuff.

But it is a very funky album. How is this different stylistically than Negrophilia?

This album is very funky, but that record is pretty much all deep funk — very raw, very disjointed. It sounds like it was made in a basement.

And this record really is a double album. Even though it’s one CD, I planned like a double-vinyl release where I could explore a large landscape. I’ve always been inspired by albums like Electric Ladyland or The White Album or Sign o’ the Times. I wanted that landscape, that amount of space. That’s really all I knew going in.

You didn’t have any songs written?

Not one. I was working on Negrophilia, and all of a sudden one day I woke up with a song in my head. I went in and cut it. I went, ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with the other thing. I’ll use it for something else.’ Then another song came — it was Black and White America. Then another one came. Then I realized I was going down another path. At that point, you either follow the plan or you follow the fresh inspiration. And you always go for the fresh inspiration as far as I’m concerned.

You’ve dealt with race and written autobiographically before, but the song Black and White America seems more pointed and personal. What’s behind that?

I had seen a documentary on racist Americans who did not like what America has become. They were full of hate and saying they planned to kill the president, and the races shouldn’t be mixing, and how disgusting it was. We all know racism exists, but seeing these people speaking in such an ignorant and hateful manner really threw me back.

So I started thinking about Martin Luther King, and my parents and what they went through, and the way I grew up. And it became the nucleus of the album for me — how we’re still dealing with all of this.

It always seems odd you cut these urban-sounding tracks in The Bahamas.

It doesn’t matter where I am. People think if I’m in The Bahamas that the music is going to be Caribbean or island-like or mellow. But I carry the music inside of me, so the location provides me with the peace and tranquility to create, but it doesn’t make the album turn out that way.

So we could drop you in Antarctica and ...

I’d still make a funk album that sounded like it was made in Harlem, yeah.

As usual, you play virtually everything yourself. But unlike a lot of solo projects, you always sound like a band.

That’s because I’m schizophrenic. I take on different personalities when I’m playing a part. I become whoever that player is. I could be playing a bass groove and envision myself as a big fat African- American guy from Detroit. Or I might be a skinny Lower East Side guitarist. I’m influenced by so many different kinds of music and players that I just have a vocabulary and characters in my back pockets. I can’t say how somebody else hears it, but I’ve always thought my songs sound like bands. More than anything, I’m a one-man band — or one-man bands.

Source : www.torontosun.com/2011/08/29/lenny-kravitz-a-one-man-gang