Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia - Lenny on Mars Edition Part 2
Slate Daily Feed
Slate
3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2023
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What do Lenny Kravitz, a hitmaker primarily in the ’90s and ’00s, and Bruno Mars, a 2010s–20s hitmaker, have in common? It turns out, a lot: Each man has a wide-ranging ethnic and musical background, with early exposure to unusual sides of showbiz. Each has scored hits in a variety of styles. They are admirers of each other’s work and have even performed live together.
But the main thing Lenny and Bruno have in common is their skill—some might say habit—of borrowing tropes and styles from hitmakers of the past. Kravitz from the very start of his career emulated the rock stylings of his heroes, like John Lennon and Sly Stone. And Bruno Mars—talk about an Unorthodox Jukebox: His career has been a parade of hits whose sound has spanned from the Police to Rick James to Michael Jackson.
Are they cultural appropriators, or genius style chameleons? Join Chris Molanphy as he chronicles two premier pop stylists of the last 30 years who wore genres like costumes and rebooted oldies into modern hits. Don’t believe them? Just watch.
Podcast production by Kevin Bendis.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:13.1 | Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine about the hits from coast to coast. |
| 0:21.7 | I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number |
| 0:26.8 | One series? On our last episode, we started to compare the hit-making careers of Lenny Kravitz |
| 0:34.1 | and Bruno Mars, two showbiz kids, fellow admirers, and genre chameleons, |
| 0:41.0 | with more than 20 years separating them but a remarkable amount in common. |
| 0:46.7 | We walked through Kravitz's career in the 90s and aughts, the rock heroes of yesteryear |
| 0:52.8 | he emulated, and the criticism he received for his |
| 0:56.5 | stylistic borrowings. We're now into the late aughts, when Lenny's career is on the wane, |
| 1:03.1 | but Bruno's is primed to explode. Lost was a song Bruno Mars originally intended to record for himself. |
| 1:19.8 | He had already been in L.A. for more than four years, with little to show for it. |
| 1:26.1 | Like Lenny Kravitz in his Romeo Blue phase, he had played in |
| 1:30.7 | cover bands. One of Bruno's regular troops was called Sex Panther, and he held out for the right |
| 1:37.8 | kind of deal. A label rep wanted to sign Bruno as a Latin act and have him sing in Spanish. |
| 1:45.9 | But the former Peter Jean Hernandez demurred. |
| 1:50.2 | Bruno even signed with Motown records for a year, but no recordings resulted from that deal. |
| 1:58.1 | About the only good thing Mars got from Motown was an introduction to an equally |
| 2:03.8 | hungry songwriter named Philip Lawrence. Lawrence and Mars began writing songs together, among which was lost. |
| 2:23.7 | Right around the time the duo were thinking of packing it in and moving back home from L.A., |
| 2:29.9 | an A&R man who used to manage Mars contacted them looking for songs for the Puerto Rican boy band Minuto. |
| 2:38.6 | Remember them? A former Minuto member replaced Lenny Kravitz in one of his bands. |
| 2:45.3 | Mars and Lawrence had to be talked into giving up their song to Minuto, but they finally sold it to him for $20,000. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.