I had an odd thought tangent while listening to this album, because what with Kravitz and Neneh Cherry earlier, it feels like we’re seeing more people with blended ethnic backgrounds, and how Cherry’s music was also kind of a mix of musical genres, so too is Kravitz’s (I’m not sure about Sananda Matreiya / Terence Trent D’Arby, his paternity isn’t given on Wikipedia). I know that Kravitz had problems with record producers for neither sounding “black enough” nor “white enough”, and it’s kind of a strange thing, really, to think of “black” and “white” music.
I know for the course of this blog I’ve skirted around referring to the likes of funk, soul, and R&B as “black” and the likes of folk, country, and rock as “white”, but certainly that’s the way it gets pitched by the music industry, even to the extent if you get white people making soul or black people making rock, they get labelled for their exceptionalism, not for the music in and of itself - "blue-eyed soul" and "black rock", for example. Yes, some elements of a lived experience are good to give music an authenticity, but it's still a strange cultural artifact when one stops to think about it. I wonder if this is why the music of, say, Brazil or Cuba has a feel that is national rather than racial, because blending ethnic heritage really isn’t the big deal that it still is in the USA.
Anyway. Kravitz ended up doing a Rundgren and pretty much playing everything himself (except for strings and saxophone) and producing his debut album. My ramblings above are partly because the music is an indefinably cool sound that blends R&B/ funk / soul beats with some hard-edged rock sounds; most of all he sounds a little like Hendrix, both with his rough-edged vocals, the grooving beats, and in some of his guitar licks (such as on Freedom Train). Fear (co-written with his then-wife Lisa Bonet) has a steady funk for the verses, kicking into grungy guitar for the chorus (and slightly Prince-like guitar solo on this one) and is one of a handful of songs addressing social justice. Mr Cab Driver is another such a one. Now that I think about it, the sound of Little Feat comes through as well, another band with an unspeakably cool tone to the music.
I know I used to have a copy of this, and I think the two follow-up albums, but although I vaguely remembered most of it, it’s not embedded in my head like some other albums on this list. I’ve also got a feeling that the next two are a bit more rocky and bit less funky but, while they’ve individually got some good tracks on them, I really can’t remember which one I liked the best. It might be worth waiting to see if they also crop on the list.
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