Now she is 74 years old and perhaps the most successful character that created in pop music culture. It is not possible to see artists like Grace Jones.
To be honest, I bought her first record in my archive for its cover. She wasn’t new to me; I had seen her in two movies before and was stuck on the fine line between admiration and anger. The first was in the movie Conan. She was a strange character, but I loved Conan, whose comics I was collecting, because she helped him so much that she played the wizard Zula. A year later, I watched her play May Day, the sadistic and murderous sidekick of megalomaniac computer baron Max Zorin, who swore to destroy Silicon Valley, in “A View to a Kill,” the 14th episode of the 007 James Bond series filmed in 1985. She was fighting like Tomboy, but I learned that she was a musician when that record came across.
She looked like an Egyptian relief with his acrobatic pose on the cover of his 1985 compilation album “Island Life”. As I got to know her music, I came to believe that the cover did justice to it. She was an extraordinary figure who destroyed the established image of woman; she was sexy, masculine, provocative and dangerous… It’s like an alchemy between the sexes… She was literally the grotesque type on the one hand, but how beautiful on the other! She had a geometric face reminiscent of African masks. His prominent cheekbones formed two triangles on her face. Her androgyny, combined with her natural skin color, had created an alien who had just fallen into the modern world. She was a true diva in pop music, but when asked, she said, “I’m not a diva, I’m Grace Jones”.
Jones hated her father, a priest, for his conservative views. Her fate changed when her family left Jamaica at the age of 12 and immigrated to New York. “Socially morbid” was written on her high school report card. She started taking acid to get rid of her embarrassment when Andy Warhol came to her rescue. And, she was the subject of her painting like a mannequin.
While her vision was developing, she moved to Paris, sharing a house with Jerry Hall. They were always partying together, and she was the center of attention with her retro outfits. While dancing naked with a bone around her neck and a baseball cap on his head, she also started her singing career with The Three Degrees’ “Dirty Ol’ Man.” The architect of the comic-book image that made Jones unique was the advertising advertiser Jean-Paul Goude, who discovered her (who later became his wife and father of his child) and shaped her while singing at a gay disco. The event that caused it to explode was the opening of the legendary disco temple, Studio 54. While she was rolling the words as if she had a bite in her mouth, she sang the songs as if she were speaking, as if it made one’s blood freeze. She reminded me a bit of Marlene Dietrich. She was aware of the limitations of his masculine voice, but she had managed to turn it into an advantage.
The second breaking point in Jones’ musical career after Studio 54 was when she started working with the duo Sly & Robbie. Then this little party girl committed numerous atrocities: for example, she was banned from DisneyPark for life because she exposed her breasts. In 1981, she beat the presenter live on a TV show in England. Boy George, Naomi Campell, Lady Gaga, the trustees of these events, were inspired by this elegant and authoritative figure.
In the nineties, Jones had vanished into thin air; she did not make an album, did not appear in the media. She only took part in special nights and closed parties. She took the stage with the tigers and converted the inspirations she received from other branches of art into music.
The last of the 10 albums that formed her career is 2008’s “Hurricane”. After this album, she toured and went to Istanbul. In her concert at the Harbiye Open Air Theater as part of the 17th Istanbul Jazz Festival on the evening of July 16, 2010, there was a very strange star in front of us, who, despite her 61 years of age, could not sit still for two hours, who could do hula hoop and sing for minutes. On the one hand, she did not neglect to talk to the audience between each song, from the jealousy of Turkish men to the talk of “fake orgasm”. She mentioned Turkish men because she had been married to Turkish bodyguard Atila Altunbay for eight years in 1996. Jones’ communication with a large gay community, especially in the front row, was solid at this concert.
