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This is how Lenny Kravitz went from rejecting juicy contracts to owning a net worth of $ 80 million
Nov
This is how Lenny Kravitz went from rejecting juicy contracts to owning a net worth of $ 80 million
This coming November 19, under the title Que rule el amor (Kultrum Books, 2020), the Spanish translation of the first volume of Lenny Kravitz’s memoirs will arrive in bookstores . First installment because, by the artist’s will, his memories will last until 1989 , which is when he turned 25 and the first important, truly momentous events of his life occurred: the publication of his first album after almost a decade striving not to tarnish the essence of his retro rock in a recording context dominated by hip hop and commercial pop with synthesizers, the birth of his daughter Zoë a year earlier, and his first marriagewith actress Lisa Bonet. All this in 300 pages.
Kravitz has already warned that this book is not about the memories of a rock star, and therefore his success and his extravagances, but his insistence and determination to break through the competitive world of music in the 1980s. It also aspires to be a spiritual X-ray of a man who has been attributed the typical frivolities that, not always with justice, are taken for granted in the life of a well-armed, sexy man with a highly personal sense of style. While much of the music press of the 90s tried to reduce Kravitz to a fan phenomenon thanks to his undoubted appeal – and who did not, what stood out was his disconnection with the present and his obsession with the past – he maintainedone obsession: taking out the blues that was inside him and channeling it in a spiritual way.
In the end, Lenny Kravitz is a mixture of the two: on the one hand, an artist convinced of the qualities of music, and an esthete who discovered rock in California in his pre-adolescence, in the late 70s, flocking on the radio. the last moments of the hippie hangover – her mother, an aspiring actress, found a job on a television series and decided to move the family from New York to Los Angeles – and who identified completely with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin – he heard the band at age 13 and something in his brain clicked – and finally Prince . He explains in his memoirs that everything is due to a dual soul, the result of being the son of different mixtures: ofa Jewish father and a Christian mother, he white and she black, torn between the present and the past, between desire and frustration for not always achieving their goals.
Throughout the 80s, still young and inexperienced, he tried to make himself heard and some of his first demos reached different headhunters of the important record companies of the moment. He was a rocker possessed by blues and psychedelia, a late hippie, but in him – with his muscular physique and statuary bearing – they saw a would-be pop star. He resigned from juicy contracts so as not to prostitute his style or stray from his goal. In the middle of the decade, when he met actress Lisa Bonet – at that time a star thanks to her role in the Bill Cosby series – everything took a turn: they fell in love in 1985, he moved to New York, they married in Las Vegasand they had a daughter, Zoë. She financed the recording of his first professional demos, and those demos went to producer Henry Hirsh. Four years later, he published his first album, Let Love Rule (1989), which is the one that gives the book its title – technically, ‘rule’ in English is to govern, not to rule, but the new nuance of the Spanish translation looks good -.
What became of Lenny Kravitz after that moment? What awaits us in the next volume of his memoirs? In terms of music, glittering hits like those of his albums from the 90s, driven by songs like Fly Away or Mr. Cab Driver – and which have led him to sell more than 40 million copies adding up his entire discography – and a unique presence on the rock star map, a revivalist in his sound, and at the same time a modern (almost a pre-hipster) in his approach to fashion. Kravitz has always gone for his ball, turning retro into the trendsetter, and normalizing excess with fur, feathers, leather and post-hippie coloring . One of his most tremendous photos is one in which, walking throughParis , where he took up residence a few years ago, went to look for coffee wrapped in a giant scarf that wrapped almost his entire body like a robe.
From Lisa Bonet he separated in 1991, and they formally divorced a couple of years later. She is the mother of her only daughter – today a sought-after actress – and that bond has led them to maintain contact and friendship. Lisa Bonet is currently married to the muscular actor Jason Momoa (the protagonist of Aquaman ), and the Kravitz-Momoa-Bonet form, de facto, a kind of large family, a tribe in which tolerance and unreserved love of the hippie ideology. Following his breakup with Lisa Bonet, Kravitz had a long relationship with French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis.to which he produced several albums, and which motivated his frequent visits to Paris, and later he had as partners the Brazilian model Adriana Lima – there was a marriage commitment that was broken after a few months – and, for a short time, the actress Nicole Kidman .
Like the two great black stars of mestizo pop-rock of the 80s, Prince and Terence Trent D’Arby, Lenny Kravitz also underwent his spiritual transformation in the middle of his adult life. If Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness and D’Arby changed his name to Sananda Maitreya after suffering a spiritual crisis that led him to found his own religious vision, a syncretism between Buddhism, Hinduism and animism, Kravitz discovered his Christian origins and reinforced his spiritual convictions that even led him to make a vow of chastity in 2004: since then, he claims to have remained celibate,and if he had not sinned on the sly – something also very Christian, since there is always room for forgiveness in God’s action – he should still keep the (reviewable) commitment not to break it until he remarries.
That moment has not yet come, and it may take a while. Lenny Kravitz currently lives in isolation at his home in the Bahamas, where he moved earlier this year, when he decided to leave Paris at a time when things were getting ugly because of the coronavirus, and fearing the general confinement that would ensue. finally decreed by President Macron. He could have chosen other destinations – he also has houses in New Orleans and Brazil – but certainly none were superior to the Bahamas. He had a house in New York – he sold it to singer Alicia Keys in 2010 for $ 14 million – and a mansion in Miami. Between record sales, copyrights, publicity work and roles in the movies, adding the real estate hits, Kravitz has accumulated atotal equity of more than 80 million dollars. He will tell us about all this, we have no doubts, in the next volumes of his memoirs, written thanks to the help of his scribe David Ritz
