GRACE INTEGRITY DANCE JONES

GRACE INTEGRITY DANCE JONES

FEATURES

ARE YOU READY FOR A BRAND NEW (DISCO) BEAT?

by Iman Lababedi

If I was writing in Australia for Tie Yer Kangaroo Down rock mag, or in Germany for Ach Tung—Der March Goes On, or in the Netherlands, Japan, England, or any fashion monthly you care to mention, I could easily leave out the preamble and simply state: “Dear Reader, I was lucky enough to speak with Grace Jones and this is what she had to say." That’s all. But despite “Pull Up To The Bumper” going top five in the American R&B charts, Grace Jorges is something of an unknown entity for the majority of this country’s record buyers. Alright, you might have seen that picture of Grace onstage at Studio 54 shaking her very pregnant booty during a party thrown for her by Debbie Harry. Even her husband Jean Paul Goude’s half-nude photo of Grace chained in a cage—all black and sweaty—snarling like a man-eating tiger. But her music? Yuck—jet-setting, hedonistic, cocainefreaked, blanked-out—double yuck—disco. I—and much of the world—became interested in Grace Jones rather late. Personally, it was the fourth album, Warm Leatherette, that pulled the right switch. Itwas pleasurably obtuse to imagine the names mentioned earlier swinging to hfer cover single of Joy Division’s “She’s Lost Control” in 1980, (listening to it makes me jittery, I guess”). And then I discovered that it was Grace who introduced the world to the Compass All Points-Island Records resident band. “Chris Blackwell (Island Records owner) is responsible for that whole Sly (Dunbar) and Robbie (Shakespear) scene. It was quite an experience working with them and Barry Reynolds, and Sticky (Thompson) and Mikey (Chung).

"I don't need to be average in order to sell more records."

So let’s get a couple of things dead straight. Eddie Van Halen won’t be playing on—and Quincy Jones won’t be producing —her next album. Grace Jones’s musical integrity-needs no excuses from me, it is evident through the steady maturity of her past three albums, through her perplexing, scary, and highly entertaining live shows. And though you can peg her as the postdisco Queen, in 1983 that is no longer a minus. Maybe it never was: “When the world was told about Disco and me, it had been around for years and years. You know, the days of Barry White, Love Unlimited, when I was modeling in Paris. Then it became a marketable thing, everybody jumped on the bandwagon, ‘Come on, let’s make a killing.’ It started years and years before that and it’ll go on years and years after—whatever they call it*.

“I don’t find it distracting, going out to , nightclubs. You’d be surprised how many people use and get inspiration out of that; it’s not something you do every single day of the year, because obviously if I was doing that I wouldn’t have the time to work. I mean, there has to be a time pi the year where I’m doing something else. But for the time that I have to do it, I do enjoy doing it. And I get a lot of inspiration from meeting people.”

With her latest LP, Living My Life, comes a press kit which names some of her admirers: Bianca Jagger, Halston, Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, Allen Carr, Jessica Lange, Yves St. Laurent, Liza Minnelli. Not to mention John Lydon (which they don’t). Grace’s hipness could be viewed as a side-effect from her modeling days, when she graced the pages of Elle and Vogue. It could be also viewed as the wrong people getting it very right. But it properly is because of her ability to instill her disco-funk-reggae sound with so many levels, and her natural ability to interest the right people. At Island Records’ Manhattan HQ she describes her modeling days thus:

“It was something I used as a stepping stone to other things—theatre, stage, film—all those things. Modeling was very good for that! But music is something that’s been in my family for generations. My mother is a singer—a libretto soprano— she could sing opera but she sang gospel; her father, was a musician, n(jy brother is a musician. So it was something in the blood more or less.

“That’s on one side of my family. On my father’s side they were more into politics.” Her father was a clergyman, and her father’s family deeply involved with Jamaican politics. “Quite a combination. Actually, the political side is good because it helps me do my own business. I’m my own manager and have been for the past four years.” , /

I present the male part of me.

“The first time they had ever played together—and they’ve been playing together ever since—it was such a success. Magic, inspiration. The combination was perfect for me, I got so much from all of them. I don’t think they can make magic for everybody, it depends on the personalities.” Sly and Robbie are of course the single most popular rhythm section in the world today; they can even make Joe Cocker sound good.

But you haven’t seen Grace Jones’s music in full force if you haven’t seen her live. Grace gives a performance that tantalizes and terrifies, her androgynous/maleand-edgy violent persona (in complete contrast to her friendly real-lifeness in conversation) compounded by props that have inqluded gorilla costumes and clones, shriek towards a real confrontation between the audience and herself. Grace tweaks and slaps her fans, confuses them so much that when a fan once handcuffed himself to her no one realized it wasn’t part of the show. It adds dimensions to her music that might otherwise perhaps be unrealized. “Violent? Oh no, not violent,” Grace argues. “I think it should be a bit/unny, not scary. More amusing than scary. I think most audiences are a little nervous watching an entertainer. They seem to feel this almost pedestal-type idolizing feeling. I guess the stage puts you in that position.

“The act is definitely...it has a very...it is an aggressive act, it is a kind of male act. I mean that’s how I see myself on stage, I present the male part of me. It’s not passive. It’s not where I’m waiting, it’s where the audience is waiting and I’m giving. Which puts me in a kind of aggression. Maybe that’s what you find scary, the fact that I’m a woman and I’m so aggressive?”

What do you want to do to your audience? Shock them? Wake them up?

“Oh, of course, I want them to let go, get taken away from wherever they might have been when they walked into the theatre or club. I think they go there for a reason and it’s certainly not to feel the same way they did when they walked in. It’s about getting them to escape in any way they need to. Or maybe not even know they need to, just as long as they do, and are affected by what they see as entertainment.

“For me, when I go to a club, I look at it from almost an athletic point of view. I’m going to get some real good dancing in, and also the music, and also...it cleans the soul, in my opinion.”

For all the Nightclubbing exteriors, Grace’s music doesn’t just function in a disco. If anything, her steady musical growth has worked away from the confines of evolving black R&B. While both Donna Summer and Michael Jackson have moved into a cooler black-pop crossover sound, and Marvin Gaye has made the final connection, the dubby “My Jamaican Guy” and angry “Nipple To The Bottle” are nothing else or less than original Grace Jones. Their success in America—among blacks or whites—has yet to be seen, though their overall success is assured. Grace feels, “There’s too many American charts, I’m not necessarily worried about the pop charts. For me there are a lot of things that go pop which are so really mediocre. I’m not about mediocrity, you see, so when I do a record I don’t think of doing a pop record ever. Otherwise I would say to my record company ‘I don’t want to do albums, let’s bang out a lot of pop singles’. I like to do albums, that’s where it’s at.

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“It could be good, but then you’re dealing with a whole political system that people aren’t even aware about. You’re dealing with selling beer, really. You’re dealing with a black and white thing first of all, then you’re dealing with advertising. It’s really involved but a lot of people don’t even know that, a lot of entertainers don’t even realize it. There they are, beating their heads against the wall, and they don’t even know that it has nothing to do with i whether the music is good or not. It’s to do with somebody in mediocre city thinking whether the music is good or not. It’s to do with somebody in mediocre city thinking whether it’ll sell some mediocre beer. I won’t give up my music for that. Why should I? I’m fine, I’m selling records all around the world. I don’t need to be average in order to sell more records. \

“I think in the end being a pop artist is like Diana Boss—if you sell that much it doesn’t matter what color you are. But all of that is completely distracting to me. I just keep working, that’s all. I know my direction. I know what I want, and if being a pop artist was what I wanted then fine, but it’s not really what I want. I want to do good work. I don’t want to look at some work later and say, ‘Well, I had to make a compromise in order for that to go pop’; I’d rather do something that’s good and I’m proud of, that I can listen to and like.”

Grace’s music is a tangled interlocking of roots and rebellion under a gauzy tinsel town rapping. It is truly rebellious, because it subverts from the inside out and converts from the outside in. She is a singular person, spreading the wings of fashion into the winds of style in a way I once thought Chic might, an innocent like Evelyn King never will, and Change might have, if Luther Vandross hadn’t left to make millions for Columbia. Greil Marcus once wrote about how complicated having simple fun was—he was referring to Elvis Presley. Grace Jones is the converse of that: how complicated the times might be and yet still remain fun. The reggae isn’t entrenched (Sly ’n’ Robbie do their very best work with Grace—including Black Uhuru), the rhythms are polypercussive yet straightforward. The ideas are dirty and hard, they provoke—not demandthought. Just as Diana Ross defined the black pop woman in the ’60s, so Grace does in the ’80s. Uncompromised. Self-reliant and right, right, right. And it doesn.’t much matter if Arrierica wakes up, there are enough fans everywhere to keep the LPs coming.