Lenny on Mars Edition Part 2

Hit Parade | Music History and Music Trivia

Slate Podcasts

Music, Music History, Music Commentary

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2023

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there, hip parade listeners, before we start the show, I want to let you know about
0:07.8	a story coming up a little later. It's from one of our partners, SAP. Is your business
0:14.9	reaching an exciting turning point? Are you ready to seize the moment for growth? Well,
0:20.8	when you're facing tough decisions, SAP can help you be ready for anything that happens
0:26.6	next. To learn more, head to SAP.com slash be ready. And stick around to hear how the
0:34.6	president of an eSports league seized the moment.
0:40.5	Welcome back to Hip Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate magazine about the
0:55.6	hits from Coast to Coast. I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's
1:01.3	Why is this song number one series on our last episode? We started to compare the hit-making
1:08.1	careers of Lenny Kravitz and Bruno Mars, two showbiz kids, fellow admirers, and genre
1:15.9	chameleons, with more than 20 years separating them, but a remarkable amount in common.
1:22.5	We walked through Kravitz's career in the 90s and aughts, the rock heroes of Yesteryear
1:28.6	he emulated, and the criticism he received for his stylistic borrowings. We're now into
1:35.3	the late aughts when Lenny's career is on the wane, but Bruno's is primed to explode.
1:50.0	Next was a song Bruno Mars originally intended to record for himself. He had already been
1:57.0	in LA for more than four years, with little to show for it. Like Lenny Kravitz in his
2:03.6	Romeo blue face, he had played in cover bands, one of Bruno's regular troops was called
2:10.2	Sex Panther, and he held out for the right kind of deal. A label rep wanted to sign Bruno
2:18.0	as a Latin act, and have him sing in Spanish, but the former Peter Jean Hernandez de Mird.
2:26.0	Bruno even signed with Motown records for a year, but no recordings resulted from that
2:33.0	deal. About the only good thing Mars got from Motown was an introduction to an equally
2:39.7	hungry songwriter named Philip Lawrence. Lawrence and Mars began writing songs together,
	...

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