GRACE JONES: NOTES
To call Grace Jones a singer is a misnomer. No criticism intended, but Grace can't really sing; you needn't remove either of your shoes to count the notes in her range, and pitch isn't at all an applicable term; her timbre can best be described as gruff.
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GRACE JONES: NOTES
JIM FELDMAN
To call Grace Jones a singer is a misnomer.
No criticism intended, but Grace can't really sing; you needn't remove either of your shoes to count the notes in her range, and pitch isn't at all an applicable term; her timbre can best be described as gruff. To some degree, the repeated comparisons to Marlene Dietrich are fitting,both Grace and Dietrich can effect a detached vocal stance, and Grace has often wrapped herself in the guise of a French chanteuse,indeed, her low-key disco version of "La Vie En Rose" (off her first album, Portfolio) was an eccentric and appreciative classic. But detachment and stolid phrasing are only starting points from which, particularly onstage, Grace launches her attack. Threatening, intimidating, teasing, sneering, supremely self-confident or arrogant (depending on your point of view), Grace unleashes wave after wave of overwhelming attitude in all directions. Grace, on lead attitude.
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Grace Jones is a unique concept. Embracing fashion, style, theatrics, various musical conceits, the concept has changed in its outward appearance over the years, with a great deal of input from Grace's former lover, multi-media artist Jean-Paul Goude. Where her first three albums were unparalleled examples of the sensual intensity and the romantic/decadent duality of disco, her fourth album, Warm Leatherette, and her fifth LP, Nightclubbing, found Grace attempting to fuse new wave music and reggae rhythms onto a stark, yet insistent disco bottom. On Living My Life, the bottom remains, but the reggae elements have been pushed up front. Similarly, her wardrobe has gone from disco outrageousness to military severity to the elegant futurism of such au courant designers as Giorgio Armani, Claude Montana, and Issey Miyake, while her skull-hugging, closecropped hairdo has given way to her startling flat-top. (You may not be interested in clothes and hair, but believe me, they are important components of the Grace Jones concept.) Onstage, Grace seems to have abandoned the motorcycles and panthers and slaves in favor of (fake) gorillas and Grace clones and Grace videos. No matter. The essential concept remains the same; call her what you will—control freak, the ultimate liberated woman, decadent bitch goddess, "dominant woman" (according to Grace herself)—Grace Jones has created a concept that begins and ends with Grace Jones. As she tersely explains, "It's a personal thinq."
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Since the release of Warm Leatherette, many critics have begun to take Grace Jones seriously. They laud her reggae leanings, the musicianship of the renowned Compass Point Studios' house band, producers Chris Blackwell and Alex Sadkin, and Grace's choice of material: on Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing, she covers songs by, among others, Sting, Chrissie Hynde, Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, and Barry Reynolds, in addition to contributing some lyrics herself and writing the taut, positive riff, "Feel Up" on Living My Life, she co-wrote four songs with Reynolds and one with Sly Dunbar, she penned another song herself, and she covers a Melvin Van Peebles song. At the same time, these critics dismiss her three Tom Moulton-produced, overtly disco albums as artistic irrelevances. Boy, are they wrong. First of all, songs such as "That's The Trouble," "I Need A Man," "Sorry," "Do Or Die," and "On Your Knees" are all-time disco greats. More to the point, however, denying the validity of Grace's immersion in disco is nothing more than barely disguised homophobia. For Grace's socio-sexual attitudes directly reflect a gay sensibility. On these early albums, Grace rails against externally imposed codes of conduct; she espouses freedom of self-expression and validates pleasure as an end in itself. For example, in "Sorry," she sings, "He loves me too/And he's not jealous of you"; in "That's The Trouble," she explains, "Every man I see/Taking every little thing so heavily"; and in "On Your Knees," a song about a guy who has treated her like shit but wants her back, she exults, "Time to beg/Time to crawl/Time to plead."
Actually, Grace's concerns recur on her three latest albums. Barry Reynolds's "Bullshit" (on Warm Leatherette) includes the definitive Grace Jones statement: "I'm sick and tired of this bullshit." "Pull Up To The Bumper" (on Nightclubbing), which Grace co-wrote and which she admits "...is a rude song," is about as sexually explicit as one can imagine. On the same album, her version of Bill Withers's "Use Me" is an undeniable exploration of dominance and submission. And on Living My Life's "Nipple To The Bottle," which she wrote with Sly Dunbar, Grace blasts male manipulation: "I won't give in and I won't feel guilty...You ain't gon get it, I ain't gon give it."
Focusing on the milieu rather than the message is an attempt to defuse the threat to accepted patterns of behavior,it is not only a homophobic reaction, it is moreover almost totally beside the point, because music is a vehicle for Grace Jones's observations on the way things are and/or should be. Nowhere is this more apparent than onstage. Grace doesn't like working with a band; she prefers singing (well, you know what I mean) to tracks, because, as she once said, "I like to know exactly what notes are going to be played." A band just gets in the way of her concept, which is primary. Knocking over some gratuitous cymbals, creating illusions with clones, humping a guy from the audience during "Pull Up To The Bumper" and pushing his head down when he turns to look at her, Grace blurs the borders between games and reality,she subverts the understood limits of performance.
