Lenny Kravitz turned 60 on Sunday. He’s just released his twelfth studio album, Blue Electric Light, and announced a Las Vegas residency, which will take place at Park MGM in October.

I spent the last 35 years basically ignoring Lenny Kravitz. Occasionally, I would become aware of one of his songs, like “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” “Fly Away,” or his cover of the Guess Who’s “American Woman” (not as good as the Butthole Surfers’ version, not as bad as everyone says). But I never listened to one of his albums all the way through, not even (true confession time) when he was signed to Roadrunner Records, a label I was working for at the time.

Of course, I’d read about him, and was aware that many people viewed him as a corny try-hard, a man who dressed the part of a swinging sex god from some sort of imaginary 1970s of the mind in order to compensate for his deficiencies as a songwriter and the fact that all of his material was classic rock pastiche. Simply put, Lenny Kravitz was as uncool as his name.

Well, I am here to tell you that if that’s what you think, you are wrong. After listening to Blue Electric Light all the way through and journeying backward through his 21st century catalog (seven albums) and even his five 1990s releases, I have come to the conclusion — and it shocked me, too — that Lenny Kravitz Is Good, Actually.

Blue Electric Light is the work of a confident artist in total command of his material and his creative process. I’m not sure how aware people are of the fact that Lenny Kravitz is a studio auteur on the level of Prince or Stevie Wonder, but he is. Other than longtime guitarist Craig Ross, and some guest horn players on two or three tracks, he plays every instrument here (and has done the same thing on the majority of his albums), including guitar, bass, a roomful of keyboards, drums both live and programmed, and percussion. And of course, he produces himself.

This album jumps from the moody, haunted funk — half Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler),” half Sly Stone’s “In Time” — of opener “It’s Just Another Fine Day (In This Universe of Love)” to the cranked-up electro-rock of first single “TK421” to the guitar-driven R&B ballad “Honey” to “Paralyzed,” which features a talk-box doom riff and a bridge straight out of, no joke, mid ’70s Ted Nugent. And that’s just the first four songs. On “Let It Ride” and “Stuck In The Middle,” he dives into the one-finger keyboards and programmed beats, and piano-laced balladry, of early ’80s Prince. He busts out a Tom Tom Club-esque synth line on “Bundle Of Joy”; “Love Is My Religion” has a hook (and handclaps) that bring to mind Huey Lewis And The News; “Spirit In My Heart” combines Spanish guitar and castanets with oozing funk synth-bass; and the closing title track is another Prince-ly ballad, complete with big gospel keyboards, hard rock guitar, and ultra-reverbed drum machine. And pretty much all of it works.

Kravitz has always been this way. He views any and every style of rock, R&B and funk as a toy to be played around with until it generates a riff, or a hook. Over the course of 12 albums, he’s absorbed Hendrixian power-trio psychedelia, early ’70s thud-rock of the James Gang/Rare Earth school, Marvin Gaye-ish sex-soul, early ’80s New Wave AOR, Dirtbombs-esque garage rock, disco-era Rolling Stones funk, James Brown as filtered through Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge,” back-to-the-land country-rock à la Neil Young or the Band, Tackhead-style industrial funk, and some sounds I can’t even pinpoint. He also does a Beatles-filtered-through-Tears for Fears psychedelic thing a lot, which I don’t love. (Examples: “Let Love Rule,” “Good Morning”.) And he has a fondness for piano ballads that rarely work.

But what makes Kravitz interesting is that he never writes a whole song in just one style. Instead, he swirls all the sounds he likes together, treating them almost like sonic tropes. This bass tone, that drum sound, that keyboard, and then on the chorus we’ll bring in the big guitars, and after the bridge — sax solo! And in the process, funk becomes rock becomes soul becomes New Wave becomes synthwave becomes postpunk becomes Lenny Kravitz Music. So it’s not like you can pull out one album and say, This is Lenny Kravitz’s rock album, or This is Lenny Kravitz’s funk album. Every track on every album is some unexpected combination of the multiple sounds he likes, combined in a slightly different way, and he’s not at all interested in maintaining a consistent mood. And when you embrace that as a listener, you find yourself nodding your head and saying, Fuck, this is a really good song more often than you expected to.

Now, there is one area where I have to confess that Lenny Kravitz is not Good, Actually. He is a purely mediocre lyricist. Just as he combines sonic tropes in order to conjure songs that have classicism, but also a kind of newness, he writes lyrics that deal with classic rock ‘n’ roll subjects — love, sex, freedom, religion, rock ‘n’ roll itself — but he does so in a very uninspired manner. I’ve listened to all 12 of his albums at this point, which is well over 150 songs, and I don’t think I’ve heard a single line that made me think, Wow, that was an unexpected metaphor or Wow, that was a really vivid image. Even when he gets personal, on a song like “Black And White America,” it never feels confessional or even particularly heartfelt.

I have a theory about this. Lenny Kravitz has a US audience, but he is a bigger star internationally. So he’s spending a lot of time singing to people whose first language is not English. It therefore makes sense for him to write songs full of simple, basic images of love, lust, euphoria, freedom, God, etc., phrased in ways that can be easily memorized and sung by audiences whose actual command of the language is fairly limited.

If this is in fact his strategy, it’s a smart one. I had a conversation about this very subject once with Max Cavalera of Soulfly and Cavalera Conspiracy (and formerly of Sepultura). Most of his songs have simple choruses, often consisting of a single word or a two-word phrase. Again, easy to memorize and scream along with a crowd, whether you’re in Brazil, Paris or Jakarta. Lenny Kravitz, despite being American, makes music for export.

And besides, how important are lyrics anyway? Your average listener only knows a few lines of most songs they like. There are certain artists — a woman with the initials T.S., for example — whose fans memorize and scrutinize every word. But most songs are half-heard, misheard, and made to mean whatever the listener wants them to mean in the moment. So as long as you get the general point, that’s enough. Especially if it’s backed by a solid riff and a hooky melody. And Lenny Kravitz has riffs and hooks falling out his ass, plus his records sound good. He’s an excellent producer of his own work, with a retro-yet-modern sonic fingerprint every bit as strong as Mark Ronson’s.

I think I’ve made my case. But for those of you who remain unconvinced, I offer the following 30-track playlist, which pulls from all 12 of his albums without including most of his hits (because just as he’s not a great lyricist, he’s often pretty bad at picking singles). Once you listen, I am confident you’ll agree that Lenny Kravitz Is Good, Actually.