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Welcome to Hip Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the hits from

coast to coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's

Wise This Song number one series on today's show. Nine years ago, this week at a New York

concert in Madison Square Garden, pop star Bruno Mars brought out a surprise guest.

This was not the first time Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars would appear on a stage together,

and it would not be the last. Kravitz had first appeared at a Mars concert the prior year in Paris,

the following year at a 2015 Kravitz concert in Hollywood, Mars made a surprise appearance,

singing from the audience. Surprise celebrity cameos at concerts are a not uncommon occurrence,

especially when musicians play major cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Paris. But the repeat

run-ins between Kravitz and Mars were, I would argue, something else, a cosmic synergy between

hit-making generations, because it would not be too grand to say that Bruno Mars.

Was a kind of successor to Lenny Kravitz?

From the start of his career at the turn of the 90s, Kravitz was an open emulator of his musical

heroes from a prior generation. Lenny was a flower-child hippie for Generation X before that whole vibe

...