Lenny Kravitz, exposed

By Justin Wm. Moyer August 5 at 4:24 AM Follow @justinwmmoyer

Clothes, they say, make the man. But occasionally, a lack thereof may make the man as well.

Example: Lenny Kravitz’s penis — revealed to the world Monday when the rocker’s leather pants split during a concert in Stockholm and much talked about online since then — says quite a bit about Lenny Kravitz. And however slight his work may have seemed around 25 years ago, the 51-year-old Kravitz — an enduring artist whose oeuvre always seems slightly out-of-sync with whatever is popular at the moment — is a significant figure who deserves a closer look.

Here’s what we can learn about the man from his manhood:

1. He’s Jewish …

Of the many photographs of Kravitz’s penis reviewed by The Washington Post for this story, Buzzfeed’s seemed to offer the closest look. And unless the whirl of enlarged pixels deceives, Kravitz bears what the god of the Old Testament, in Genesis 17:11, called “the sign of the covenant between me and you”: circumcision.

Of course, one need not be Jewish to be circumcised. And Kravitz, who once made a record called “Baptized,” is Christian — a tattoo on his back reads “My heart belongs to Jesus Christ,” and he reportedly took a vow of celibacy that may be ongoing. But that doesn’t mean Judaism isn’t part of his worldview.

“I’m also a Jew,” he said in 2004, the year “Baptized” was released. “It’s all the same to me.”

And some Jews are happy to have him.

“Kravitz grew up listening to a combination of rock and soul music and, in some ways, may have embodied the ‘sense of other’ that many American Jews felt as record labels rejected his work for not being either white or black enough,” Tablet wrote ahead of the artist’s first trip to Israel in 2012.

2. … but don’t label him.

For Kravitz — the son of a black Bahamian mother (Roxie Roker, who appeared as Helen Willis on “The Jeffersons”) and a Russian, Jewish father (Sy Kravitz, an NBC news producer) — his physical appearance and the religions he was exposed to can’t contain him. In fact, he wasn’t even aware of his diverse background until the first day of first grade.

“I didn’t think about my parents being different races,” Kravitz said in a video at Oprah.com in 2013. “… I grew up around people of all colors and religions and backgrounds. So this was normal to me.”

This bliss ended when another student ran up to Kravitz and his parents, declaring: “Your father’s white!”

“I didn’t understand what that was about,” Kravitz said. He described his frustration in school when he had to list his race on forms.

“My great-grandmother’s Cherokee Indian, my father’s a Russian Jew, my mother’s Bahamian,” he said. “What the hell do I put on this thing? … So many parts of your heritage are just squashed.”

3. He’s a throwback …

As Kravitz’s leather pants split in Stockholm, it quickly became clear, as his genitalia swayed in the Swedish breeze, that he had performed his concert unencumbered by an undergarment. The au naturel move was perfectly in tune with Kravitz’s aesthetic — not avant-garde, but arriere-garde.

“It was the mid ’80s, and all of that new high-tech gear was coming out, but I didn’t like the way it sounded,” he told Vintage Guitar in 2004. “I got fed up with it, and chucked it all. … I just got into all these pure tones, and I knew that the records that I liked didn’t sound like the records that were out in the ’80s, which didn’t sound intimate or organic; they didn’t have a purity.”

The wisdom of such old-school choices were borne out by the success of Kravitz’s debut, “Let Love Rule.” Released in 1989, the record sounded more like 1969. In both form and presentation, “Let Love Rule” and many of Kravitz’s other efforts name-check artists of days gone by: Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye. As Nirvana took punk mainstream and hip-hop overtook the Billboard charts, Kravitz was, more or less, conservative enough to be a revolutionary of sorts.

“A few critics were quick to assume that Kravitz’s retro look and sound were simply a schtick to get the public’s attention, but come the ’90s, it had become integrated into the mainstream (both musically and fashion-wise), proving that Kravitz was a bit of a trendsetter,” All Music wrote.

4. … but he’s adaptable.

Some were surprised that Kravitz’s unsheathed nether regions also bore the mark of a very un-retro piercing. The adornment impressed no less a personage than Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, esteemed composer of “Love in an Elevator.”

“Dude … no underwear and pierced,” Tyler wrote Kravitz, as Kravitz confirmed in a tweet bearing the hashtag “#penisgate.” “You never showed me that s—.”

On at least one occasion, Kravitz’s seems to have spoken of the piercing’s carnal powers.

“It’s a hoop about the size of a quarter,” he said in 2004, as Contact Music reported. “It hits the lady where she likes it and, because it swings, it can be effective in any position.” (This, presumably, was before the vow of celibacy discussed above.)

In the name of success, it seems, Kravitz is willing to bring any element — no matter how unexpected — into the equation. He can sell “Are You Gonna to Go My Way?,” a song that sounds so much like Led Zeppelin that Jimmy Page should have hauled him into court; he can experiment with trip-hop; he can rock the Superbowl; and he can credibly play very visible supporting roles in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and “The Hunger Games.”

As other artists in their sixth decade struggle with a changing music industry or the social media age, Kravitz, ever the chameleon, seems to effortlessly thrive. It’s almost as if this shape-shifter — arguably a marginal artist once best known for marrying actress Lisa Bonet — has has crafted a place for himself in American music by merely assembling the best of what he finds around him.

Including, in this case, a little extra metal down under.

“If you listen to my records, you can find rock, soul, country, blues, reggae, and classical, so it’s so hard to say who and what style of music really influenced me,” he said in 2004. “It’s just more like music inspires me, period.”