The prolific Barcelona publishing house continues to pleasantly surprise Kultrum books, this time with the translation of the biography of the supreme rocker Lenny Kravitz. And the fact is that the Catalan corporation has executed this transfer, into our language, just a month and a half after the publication of the original volume in English, with which it must also be given credit for said urgency. With an immense success on her part, Kultrum herself seems to have proposed a noble objective of the type: “Let the public enjoy the biography of Kravitz in Spanish” and has been, nothing more and nothing less, than the renowned music critic Ignacio Juliá the one in charge of adapting the 300 original pages to the language of Cervantes.
Add that Kultrum has carried out an exception in its usual line of covers with a small photo and a background of a specific color and that is that now the image of the interpreter (in this case Lenny) occupies the entire front. Pleasantly unexpected, I repeat, this visual flexibility in the case of this company specialized in literature on harmonic sensations.
Indeed, the title of the work comes from the artist’s very radiant debut LP Let love rule (1989) and it is precisely until that same year that history reaches, since Lenny goes back to his birth in 1964 and recounts the first 25 years of his exciting and bizarre existence.
With the valuable and stylist collaboration of the highly experienced David Ritz, also author of biographies on Marvin gaye (1985), Etta James (1995), BB King (1996), Janet Jackson (2011) o Aretha Franklin (2014 and also the latter translated by Kultrum, in 2020); Among others, the aforementioned New York star recalls those times when he was only an anonymous musical stonemason and tried, in the mid-1980s, to chisel out his highly personal and “inrockuptible” artistic foundations; which, from the 90’s and up to the present, would bear fruit and transform him into a global celebrity (although on the latter, for the moment, there are no autobiographical memoirs).
An honest and electric chronicle of how, just like her idolized Jimi Hendrix, the great Kravitz challenged the most purists who tried to condition him towards a specific musical direction, in the 80s and showed multinational record companies that rock and roll is not imposed by skin color or by fashion trends. times, but that this genre of sound is enjoyable for everyone, at any time and can be played by anyone who wishes.
Detailed and dizzying episodes are also being developed about the most varied albums and bands that our protagonist was auditioning from an early age, about the two very different family cultures that are combined inside, about his school period in New York before moving to Los Angeles, about her various youth romances, about her early flirtations with drugs, about her relationship with her famous actress mother and influential father, or about her deep soaking in religion and pacifism; as well as the germ of his well-known gift for composing songs and for making all the instruments sound himself.
Lenny Kravitz has clearly hinted in some recent interviews that, in the very near future, a second part of his experiences could be reflected in another volume on paper, so a server (as a follower of the artist and author of several articles about this interpreter that you can find here in Muzikalia) hope that, hopefully, the very capable Books of Culture bring us also the juicy continuation of the “Kravitzian” chronicle; which would already be about the years of Lenny’s total musical triumph, that is, from 1989 onwards; as suggested before. That longing floats, from now on, that the project led by the respected editor Julian Viñuales You can also bet on extending this brave first initiative of your organization in favor of the huge Lenny Kravitz.
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