BROKE THE MOULD

Written by: Nick Levine

When we say “broke the mould”, we are talking about Grace Jones, and Grace Jones only.

When Grace Jones opens her 2008 album Hurricane by declaring “this is my voice: my weapon of choice,” she isn’t quite telling the whole story. There’s no denying the Jamaican singer, actress, and model has a rich and imposing vocal tone—no one who’s heard ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’, her 1981 signature hit, would dare leave more than a metre’s gap when parallel parking. But the 73-year-old’s instantly recognizable voice isn’t the only weapon of mass seduction in her arsenal. Jones became an unstoppable pop pioneer not just because she sounded like no one else, but also because she presented herself like no one else.

In the past, Jones was often referred to as the “muse” of postmodern graphic designer and photographer Jean-Paul Goude, her frequent collaborator and one-time romantic partner. But these days, this framing of their relationship feels reductive and a little bit sexist. Goude definitely helped Jones to refine and elevate her aesthetic, most notably in his stunning cover designs for her seminal 1980s albums Warm Leatherette and Nightclubbing, but he didn’t invent Grace Jones’ look. Recalling her performance at a New York City gay club in 1977, a few years before she began collaborating with Goude, Pitchfork music critic Barry Waters wrote in 2015: “Her image celebrated Blackness and subverted gender norms; she presented something we had never seen before in pop performance—a woman who was lithe, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribald, butch swagger.” During her imperial phase, Jones also created indelible images with other visionary photographers including Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe.

It’s impossible to separate Jones’s startling androgynous image from her thrillingly unique music because one infuses the other. When she sings “feeling like a woman, looking like a man, sounding like a no-no, making what I can” on her strutting 1979 single Walking in the Rain, it almost feels like a modus operandi. After a stint as a model in the early 1970s— while living and working in Paris, she shared an apartment with fellow cover girls Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall—Jones launched her recording career with 1975’s disco hit I Need a Man. A trio of pretty kitsch disco albums followed, but Jones really found her sound when Island Records founder Chris Blackwell encouraged her to record with a genre-fusing band at Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas. “Chris took all my different worlds and stuck them all together to create the Compass Point All Stars—the erotic French side, the acid-tripping rock ‘n’ roller, the Jamaican drum and bass, the androgynous android electronics,” Jones recalls in her autobiography I’ll Never Write my Memoirs.

The result: a spectacular blend of reggae, pop, post-punk, funk, and disco that still sounds box-fresh today. Jones’ early 1980s singles like Pull Up to the Bumper, I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango), and My Jamaican Guy are crisp and evocative new-wave classics; her 1985 collaboration with British producer Trevor Horn yielded one of the decade’s great dance singles: Slave to the Rhythm. Listening to Jones is a bit like eavesdropping on an enigmatic and impossibly glamorous next- door neighbor. She even turned the waspish Pretenders song Private Life into an ice-cool hit single, prompting the band’s singer Chrissie Hynde to say: “When I first heard Grace’s version I thought, ‘Now that’s how it’s supposed to sound!’” Even great music tends to date, but somehow the Grace Jones catalogue remains strangely ageless—much like the woman herself.

In recent decades Jones has recorded sparingly—2008’s Hurricane remains her last studio album to date—while retaining an enviable presence. Who doesn’t know who Grace Jones is? She’s even shown a little more of herself in Bloodlight and Bami, a feature length documentary by director Sophie Fiennes, and that riveting autobiography. These projects have helped to humanize a pop cultural icon who was once presented as a cyborg-like racing driver in a famous car commercial directed by Goude, but they hardly dent her quintessential enigma.

If Grace Jones didn’t exist, you couldn’t make her up, which is why she’s just as fascinating today as she ever was.