Lenny Kravitz is cool. But he wasn’t always so cool. When he arrived on the scene, hip-hop and dance music dominated culture. Even rock bands began using drum machines and synthesizers.
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His embrace of classic rock ‘n’ roll and soul wasn’t hip, and people laughed at the peace and love ideals he was dragging around from the past. George H. W. Bush followed President Ronald Reagan, and the supposed trickling down of wealth—remember all that wealth—made Kravitz appear like he’d arrived in a time machine.
However, not everyone could see a shining city on a hill. Kravitz’s world looked very different. In one of the most powerful songs from his debut album, he plucks a specific moment from his life to address hate. If nothing else, it explains why he called his first album Let Love Rule.
Taxi!
“Mr. Cab Driver” follows Kravitz’s attempts to hail a cab from Lower Manhattan to Hoboken, New Jersey. Twenty cabs passed the singer until one finally stopped. Once Kravitz told the cabbie the destination, the driver booted him from the car.
Mr. cab driver, won’t you stop to let me in
Mr. cab driver, don’t you like my kind of skin
Mr. cab driver, you’re never gonna win
The angry driver wasn’t going to drive to New Jersey, and he didn’t like the color of Kravitz’s skin. Making things clear, he didn’t let love rule, but he did let racial epithets fly as the argument escalated.
Mr. cab driver don’t like to way I look
He don’t like dreads; he thinks we’re all crooks
Mr. cab driver reads too many storybooks
The incredible episode ended with Kravitz fighting the driver on top of the taxi. Even by New York standards, this must have been something to witness. Are you gonna go my way? No!
Comedy Deflecting Pain
Kravitz intended to do some comedy with “Mr. Cab Driver,” but the song shows the unfinished work of the civil rights movement. In a contemporary review for the Los Angeles Times, Chris Willman derided Kravitz’s peace-and-love idealism. Willman wasn’t critical of the ideal in general but the overt earnestness of Kravitz’s chic hippiedom.
Some listeners rejected Let Love Rule in 1989, but Kravitz outlasted the critics and proved his desire for universal love was much more than a fashion statement. Returning to Kravitz’s sarcasm in “Mr. Cab Driver,” comedy is often used to deflect pain.
People search for identity to learn where they come from and discover who they are. However, identity is also a tool for belonging. Sapiens are social creatures; if you belong to a group, you are not alone.
Born into a family with an African American mother and a Jewish father, Kravitz struggled with childhood. Close to his mother, Roxie Roker, known for her role as Helen Willis on “The Jeffersons,” his complicated relationship with his father, Sy Kravitz, led to him getting kicked out of his home. Translated into music, Kravitz struggled to find his voice in music until he met his future wife, Lisa Bonet. The star actress helped him find his voice, leading to a new batch of songs that would make up Let Love Rule.
Generational Bigotry
Roker was the first person in her family to attend college. She enrolled at Howard, a historically Black research university, and met Kravitz’s father, Sy, while working as a secretary for NBC.
Speaking with NPR, Kravitz recalled the prejudice his parents faced as an interracial couple in the 1960s. He said, “I heard stories about people spitting at them in the street. … My father once took my mother somewhere, and they had to get a hotel, and the person at the desk said, you know, no prostitutes allowed.”
His paternal grandparents could not accept that Roker was Black and wasn’t Jewish. It took Kravitz being born to soften them and finally bond with his mother. The intolerance he’s writing about in “Mr. Cab Driver” affected him within his own family.
Freedom Train
Returning to the early critics who dismissed Kravitz’s hippy leanings, some perspective on his life shows why he’d write the lyric: Come on dance on the freedom train. “Mr. Cab Driver” may have been intended with humor, but the real-world hatred Kravitz witnessed and felt wasn’t a joke.
Flower power songs can be trite. Who needs another album of platitudes? But if the stubborn problem of racism persists, then generations of pop stars will continue singing “All You Need Is Love.”
Like Kravitz himself, Let Love Rule ages well. The album is a Prince-like one-person show, introducing a unique and talented new artist at the time. Is the album derivative? Yes, it is. So were The Beatles (Little Richard), The Rolling Stones (Muddy Waters), and Prince (James Brown, Jimi Hendrix). All of them, Dylan-like musical thieves and great.
With his life story known, what else should he have written about? Some people multiply hate, making it durable and resistant to change. Kravitz took the opposite approach. His theme is love, and in the spirit of that theme: Mr. cab driver, f–k you, I’m a survivor.
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Photo by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
