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“Baptism marks a musical and spiritual rebirth. That’s what this album is all about.”—Lenny Kravitz
For Lenny Kravitz, 2004 marks a milestone. It’s been 15 years—an eternity in rock ’n’ roll and pop culture time—since he first arrived on our radar Mr. Lisa Bonet, a one-man band offering Prince-fortified neo-psychedelia courtesy of his debut long-player, Let Love Rule. In the meantime, he’s released five albums that have seen the hippie acoustics giving way to a fully formed rock god in the mold of his idols, a classic-rock craftsman who completely absorbed his influences en route to creating a funk-dappled, Marshall-stacked groove all his own.
Following 2001’s critically acclaimed Lenny, Kravitz was at a crossroads. He was turning 40, and he’d already scaled the top of the charts, selling more albums and winning more awards than almost all of his peers. But the question remained: What would he do next? In a sense, his seventh album, the aptly titled Baptism, is a return to his roots—the one-man band of his early output. Not only did he write, produce, arrange, and perform all 13 of the album’s tracks; he also played most of the instruments, including guitar, bass, and drums. But it’s more than that: Baptism is an acknowledgement of, and commitment to, rock ’n’ roll as faith—the artistic statement of a true believer.
Judging by a clutch of the album’s finest tracks—the fuzz-infused blooze of the addictive first single, “Where Are We Runnin’?” the sex-slathered “Lady,” the psych-swagger of “Minister Of Rock ’N Roll”—Kravitz is again up to his feather-boa/leather-pants rock-god thing. But that’s where the similarities to Are You Gonna Go My Way and 5 end. By and large, Baptism finds the middle-aged rocker in a soulful, reflective mood, yearning to swap his fame and fortune for simpler pleasures on the somber “The Other Side,” questioning his life choices on the piano ballad “What Did I Do With My Life?” and searching for spiritual nourishment on the title track.
Make no mistake: Despite his protestations on “I Don’t Want To Be A Star,” Lenny Kravitz very much wants to be a star. Fact is, at this stage of the game, he wouldn’t know how not to be a star (as his leather-pants cleaning bill no doubt attests). It’s just that, at 40, he’s taking stock of what stardom implies and weighing its demands against more important concerns. In that sense, his music doesn’t feed stardom so much as provide the key to soul satisfaction. Bathing in the spiritually rejuvenating waters of rock ’n’ roll, it turns out, was essential to learn how deep they run and just how life-affirming they can be. With Baptism, a new, more confident Lenny Kravitz has been born—a more highly evolved artist who, make no mistake, can still shake his ass with the best of ’em.
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| —Steven Chean |
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