Lenny Kravitz. Oh man, Lenny Kravitz: where can I begin to talk about this guy? Lenny Kravitz is to music what Helen Keller is to the spoken word. I listened to about a song and a half of his the other day to give me sufficient grounds to bash him in a review. I would have finished the second song except that I sawed my ears off with a straight razor and slammed my head in a car door repeatedly to end the pain. He's really that good.
After listening to these songs, I've determined that Mr. Kravitz's best lyric is "Unh." The great thing about this lyric is that, since he's not saying anything intelligible, you don't have to think about how retarded the things he's saying are. Seriously, a song comprised entirely of him saying "Unh", despite the fact that it would resemble either extreme constipation or childbirth, would be a major step up from some of his lobotomy-inspired work.
Case study: "Fly Away." In this song, Lenny says such genius things as "I wish that I could fly/Into the sky/So very high/Just like a dragonfly." A dragonfly? Yeah, those things are way up in the sky so very high. Oh wait, no, they hover about a foot above a pool of tepid water, which is about where I'd like to see Lenny hanging right now. Yes, hanging.
If this line hasn't convinced you yet that this song is moronic, here's an extended quote from the song. This was pulled directly from a lyrics site with no modifications—this is actually how it goes:
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah yeah yeah
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah yeah yeah
I got to get away
Feel I got to get away
Oh oh oh yeah
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah with you yeah yeah
Oh Yeah !
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah with you yeah yeah
I got to get away
I want to get away X4
Yeah
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah with you yeah yeah
I got to get away
I want to get away X4
Yeah
I want to get away
I want to fly away
Yeah with you
Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
For those of you not counting, he just used a grand total of 12 words for the last 75% of his song. That's right, he repeated 12 words, in seemingly random order, for 158 straight words (assuming that "x4" implies repeating something, as opposed to him actually singing "x4"). Looks like somebody dropped out of school after the first day of music theory class, but really took the lesson on repitition to heart.
It took me a while to finish this song, mostly because I kept having to restart it because I thought my CD player was skipping or something. Afterwards, though, I had the distinct pleasure of listening to "American Woman." The lyrics of this song are even more inspiring. About as inspiring as poetry written by 5th graders. In fact, let's do a quick comparison. Try to guess which one of these quotes is from 5th grade poetry, and which one is from Lenny Kravitz:
Now woman
I am sad
Stay away
That is bad
American woman
I'm at school
Listen what I say
That's not cool
Seriously...the rhymes in this song have the approximate depth of Mount Kilimanjaro. That's a bad thing. This is not the most astounding fact about Kravitz's lyrics, though: after I heard this song, someone told me that it was, in fact, just a cover of an earlier song. That's right—Lenny Kravitz thought this song was so great that he could never write something as good, and decided to cover it instead. Two words: oh, wow.
Now some of you might try to argue that it doesn't matter how terrible the words are, the real reason to listen to the song is for the music. If the music's so important, though, then why do they have some jerk croaking out crappy lyrics over it? If you want to listen to just the music, maybe you should try out some Beethoven, or at least a good modern Beethoven cover band like the London Philharmonic. If you still insist that you like listening to music with a banshee wailing over it, though, here's more proof that every part of Lenny's music sucks: Guitar World awarded his "American Woman" riff one of the top 100 worst riffs of all time. That's right, he even beat out Chopsticks. The sad thing, though, is that American Woman took an even worse spot than Bob Dylan. Just think of it—they're saying that Lenny Kravitz is actually WORSE than Bob Dylan. That's not good. That's like when you take a test and find out that the passing grade was a 57, but you got a -3,142,967,812 and your answers were run through a paper shredder and pissed on by Dominican immigrants before being dropped into the mouth of a volcano.
I can only think of one way to score Kravitz on this one: 4 out of 4 one-syllable words repeated excessively for the duration of the holocaustic tragedy that is the airtime given to any Lenny Kravitz song.
