by Grace Jones
In Jamaica, I don’t need lipstick; I don’t need to dress up like I did in Paris and look perfect. There is a Jamaican side that few get to see. I don’t wear any makeup, and basically I just wear loose cloth. I stay in a bathing suit and a sarong. In and out of the sea all day. I can spend hours in the sea, like I’m floating in space. You lose any sense of time. There is no time. You drift into another dimension. The sea is doing a million things at once, but it’s also only doing one thing. It’s very natural. My music needed the natural me that was resurrected, or there for the first time, during that trip to Jamaica that Sybil organized. The mirrored, costumed, bombed me didn’t disappear but became a part of what I did. The natural, native me could take the lead. Once I got that base right, found my roots, which I had been afraid of, everything started to fit.
Jamaica has an attitude you can feel. It’s hard to explain until you go there, but it has had an enormous influence on the rest of the world. It is very organic and magnetic; it has a real, definite aura that is in the air, the sea, the earth, the history, and it is like nowhere else, although in many ways its closest comparisons are other stray, enigmatic pieces of land surrounded by water, like Iceland, Sri Lanka, and Venice. Jamaica has this powerful life force, and it can take hold of you, like its reggae does. Sometimes people don’t want to leave the island; sometimes it’s like the island doesn’t want you to leave. You can get trapped, and you can’t leave, and you don’t know why. And you’re not too worried about it, actually, but it’s not what you expected.
It sometimes feels like an animal with a consciousness all of its own. It’s a lion place. There’s lot of pride and fierceness. If you’re not fierce, you’re going to get eaten up. I grew up with it. I had it from being a little girl going to school in my uniform. You see it now on the schoolgirls making their way to school like I did, as if nothing has changed, except there are more things to remember. Every pleat, every detail, every braid, on the girls, however willful they feel, is held in place. It is a source of such pride. You have to be a lunatic to fall apart on the island, a total rum head. Struck by the moon. Let down by the land.
The bus filled with tourists would pass me when I was six on my way to school looking so immaculate—perfectly pressed uniform, everything matching, not a hair out of place, immaculately positioned beret—and I would stick my tongue out at it. My appearance resulted from a discipline that came from stiff, domineering British formality fed through the Jamaican sense of pride and resistance. The Jamaicans took discipline to another level.
It’s like me. No matter how much I rebel, I have that discipline: I press the button and I take control, however wild I might be. My pride takes over. And my vanity. Jamaicans are very vain. The guys want to look good, and they have this show-off thing, and they go as far as they can in terms of looking strong, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. They are very sure of themselves—sometimes with very little. There is a tendency with the men that the lionesses go out and do all the work, while the men want to look good, sleep, eat, charm the pants off every woman, and have sex. Men know it and the women know it, and they’ve worked out how to get along knowing this is how it works.
There’s a thing a lot of Jamaicans do when they first meet people, which is that they look them up and down to check them out. Their figure, what they’re wearing, their general demeanor. They’ll give you a quick once-over, discreetly and yet pretty obviously, weighing you up to make sure you’re worthy of a little attention, of their time.
Jamaica smells like nowhere else. It smells of the stars, of sweat, skin, freshly washed and filthy, fresh fish and clogged drains, vegetation and sin. Some smells you cannot describe because they change all the time. The sun pounds down, and then suddenly there is a rain shower and a new kind of smell comes up out of the earth. The rain beats down, but the sun is still shining, and the smell scrambles your senses. It’s a smell that takes you on a journey into a dream, that almost causes hallucinations. It doesn’t cost anything. I like Jamaica because of how you can have the most intense, sudden experiences, due to the land, the weather, the combination of heat and dirt, sea and forest, and they don’t cost anything.
It’s always growing and exploding into life. The people are perhaps so proud and vain and confident in order to tame all of this exuberance. It was always a place of comings and goings and staying put. It feels like it could be the center of the universe, but it doesn’t make much of it.
It’s all coast, tightly holding in mountains, flavors, plants, music, dancing, growth, enterprise, spice, movement, creatures, violence, bitter history, the Caribbean lilt and cockiness, and a way of stretching and displaying the body that started here and traveled the world. It’s a constantly creative place. Its genius is in its music. There are more producers of music than consumers, something that is happening around the world now, but which happened in Jamaica first. The creative entrepreneur, doing a bit of this and a bit of that, realizing their potential in any number of ways. A new dance comes along all the time, channeling all the raw, funny, sexy energy, and spreads around the world, because it’s irresistible. There is an amazing humor on this island; even when people are being edgy or provocative and challenging, you want to laugh with them.
Their attitude is contagious. The fun they have having fun, finding ways of having fun, and poking fun has infected a lot of modern music. Jamaicans are super-athletic as well. Fast, long, high, powerful. They have a kind of elemental determination to make their presence felt. When they’re good at something, it goes without saying that they want to take it to another level. Sure, there’s Usain Bolt, shining fast, but at another extreme, you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen a flexible Jamaican lady pole dance. It all takes a kind of physical genius.
* * *
A lot of my attitude about money comes from the fact that I know I can come to Jamaica and enjoy the place itself without having any money. If making money becomes too stressful—the need for luxury or maintaining a lifestyle or just to pay the rent —I can go, “See you. I’m going to Jamaica. Leave me alone. I’m going to plant a tree and watch it grow. Build a house and pass the time. Sell the shells and ice-cold jelly from a shack. Look out to sea. Look out over the mountains. Disappear into the woods.” I can find happiness in Jamaica even though my childhood was so scary and brutal. There was still enough of the power of the island that kept me happy and positive.
When I go back, I often spend some time with Chris Blackwell. He’s been a constant in a life filled with so many changes, in my music, my management, my personal life, and he remains a fixed point. Since I first met him, he has always been involved in my music and my life whether I was signed to Island Records or not. Chris is my first best male friend. We totally bonded. He understood me and always wanted the best for me. He pushed me in every way, tested me musically and creatively, making me stretch and demanding the best. He always wanted me to learn and develop. He taught me also how to do things for myself in this crazy business. He never wanted to keep me ignorant. A lot of people in the music business like to keep you ignorant, but he likes me to learn for myself.
There’s no agenda with Chris; he’s simply interested in the best for me. He tells me how he feels, I tell him how I feel. He thinks he’s right, I think I’m right—in a way, we’re both right. Ultimately, we’re after the same thing. We sometimes go about it in different ways. We both go against the grain, but sometimes we battle each other.
When I was at his house many miles inland, surrounded by many shades of wild green, sensing the constant pulse of the island, hearing the wind in the coconut trees, talking about this book, he said to me, “Make sure there is Jamaica in there. Don’t forget the Jamaican you.”
He always says that my image, throughout all the changes and countries and manipulation, is totally Jamaican. “From outer space, but very Jamaican, strong and grounded, like your mom and dad. I think people thought you were American because of the accent, but you are totally Jamaican. What makes
you so determined and powerful comes from Jamaica. The island is somehow blessed. There is something about it that is unique.”
My home is here, but I have traveled a lot, and I love traveling, but there is something about Jamaica, the energy, the soil itself, and mostly the people. They have a sense of identity, a strong sense of humor. It is an incredibly stimulating place. And since 1960 Jamaica started creating its own popular music, and it is still relevant now. It’s one of the few places that did that. After America and Britain, no other country has managed to do that with such distinctive style. To invent a popular music that could only come from one place that has traveled worldwide and that constantly changes. Such a tiny island has done this.
Jamaica has been important for five hundred years. Since America was discovered. Jamaica was discovered at the same time. In a way, it was more important, because a large country wasn’t so easy to handle back then. There were no cars, no way of covering the land easily. So the coastlines held the value. Islands were really precious, and if you were going to go inland you had to find something of value very quickly. That’s why South America became important. Kingston was the seventeenth-biggest natural port in the world. The Dutch, the Spanish, the British all squabbled with each other over ownership, and in its own way it was a kind of gold rush. Since the beginning of time people will go to where the action is, and Jamaica for five hundred years has been attracting all different kinds of nationalities. It’s full of all kinds of people from all kinds of countries—Chinese, Lebanese, Syrian, Jews, many races living next to each other with definite ease, adapting all the time, more than people really understand: out of many, one people.
That action from early on, all those different people, it has never been a sleepy place where little is happening. It can seem really sleepy, but the truth is it is never asleep. That’s my theory: It has had action since the 1500s, and you cannot curtail that buildup of energy. It’s like when the West was being opened up, Jamaica was playing a starring role. It was like being at the beginning of Silicon Valley. Jamaica was the Silicon Valley of its day.
7.
Change
I had no idea that there was already a problem between Jean-Paul and Toukie. When we were all together in New York I’d hang out with the pair of them. They were still together, but after Toukie’s time in Paris, they were talking about splitting up. I didn’t know that. Me and Jean-Paul would talk and talk and talk until dawn while Toukie read or slept next door, and then I would go back to my apartment. There was nothing going on; we would talk about art and ideas and life. How he saw his work, what he was interested in.
Some people I loved to get to know because they’d take me to new places I would never have gone on my own. With Jean-Paul, I would dress up as a boy—which was easy to do with my flat chest, big jacket, no makeup, thicker eyebrows, maybe a pencil-thin mustache drawn on—and go to peep shows. Peep shows were everywhere around Times Square in the 1970s, dirty, sleazy places on the edge of legality, where you’d drop a quarter in a slot and see crackling film loops of lewd stripteases or real topless girls gyrating, stroking themselves, moaning, licking their lips, dancing with dildos. It was masturbation central, dripping with sticky desire.
Forty-Second Street was lined with giant porn movie theaters, each boasting that it had the filthiest show in town. Inside, there would be all sorts of people—junkies, drunks, businessmen, hookers, loners, underage curiosity seekers, and Jean-Paul and I would blend in. It was a way of going on a date without it seeming like we were going on a date. Two guys looking for some furtive fun, a stimulating change of environment.
Times Square was very different in the 1970s from how it is now. It was almost a no-go area, where the all-things-are-possible American dream had turned rotten and was leaking something foul into the city. Manhattan was separated into zones, and they all existed apart from each other, and yet they also intersected. Parts of downtown were run-down, even derelict, so there was a rough zone. There was also a money zone, a tourist zone, a drug zone, a park zone, and a club zone, and there was a sex zone. Prostitutes were on the street in broad daylight. For a couple of blocks, New York seemed paved with hypodermic syringes.
The mood changed as the lights went down and the neon glowed grimy as if the colors were powered by sweat and desperation. That’s when neon meant little but sleaze. Steam randomly spumed up out of the ground as though it would eventually cover the streets. There was real racy theater on the streets. It was very kinky. There was a blatant sense of danger, and violence never seemed far away. This was the world Travis Bickle cruised in Taxi Driver, wanting to clear the scum off the streets, the “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies.”
Back then, the center of the city was adults only. Eventually the deviant XXX energy was annihilated by the corporate world, and Times Square became somewhere you could take your kids. It went from Travis Bickle to Hannah Montana. The naughty bits were chopped off. The scum was cleared from the streets. The area was refreshed, offering a different brand of consumer satisfaction. If it hadn’t been pulled back from the brink of something postapocalyptic, you imagine it would have dragged the rest of the city, and the world, down with it. They’ve taken the smell out of it, though. It’s not the Big Apple to me anymore. It’s turning into one big shopping mall, one big Apple store.
It was easier to love then, somehow. Truer, if sicker. Jean-Paul and I used to go for curious, creepily romantic kicks, crossing over into a shabby, sex-filled reality, and we started to bond in the steamy, dark recesses of Peep-O-Rama and Show World.
We’d talk and talk into the night, until the sun came up, and even though he wasn’t my type physically, I fell in love with his mind, with how he saw the world. I loved how he saw me—he saw me in ways that I had felt instinctively but never been able to articulate.
He was an amazing dancer, and had come to America on a ballet scholarship. I’d get him on the dance floor sometimes, and he’d drop in a few ballet steps. He was always exercising and keeping fit. His mother was a dancer with the Ziegfeld Follies, and she would tell him a lot of stories about the exotic dancers.
I loved boxing—my dad was an amateur boxer—and so did Jean-Paul. He was obsessed with it. Warhol was fascinated as well, with tough, driven characters literally fighting to make a name for themselves and escape their poor backgrounds. Jean-Paul and Andy had a project they developed together, The Main Event, with the boxer and actor Chu Chu Malave. They took it to a big Hollywood producer, and he took it from them. It went to Barbra Streisand, when it became something else altogether, with Ryan O’Neal. Streisand was at her Hollywood peak—there was no competition, even with Warhol involved.
The dancing, the boxing, it all fed into Jean-Paul’s thoughts about the body, how it moved, how it dealt with danger and changed shape when it was stimulated or threatened. He was interested in representing the body not as it is but as it feels, as it dreams, as it could be if the imagination was in charge. He was a choreographer and coach and analyst and he wanted to take revenge on reality as much as I did, for his own reasons.
Esquire was where he obtained the training for the techniques he would use when he worked with me—how he would illustrate and conceptualize ideas, marking a fluid border between the blatantly avant-garde and the unashamedly commercial, and how he would somehow treat product as human, and people as product, giving glamour depth and the profound something glittery. It was astounding how precise he could be, and at the same time so extravagant—simultaneously unrestrained and composed. He also had that French thing, that insolent, provocative humor, where the clown and the existentialist are as funny and as serious as each other.
I admired his work so much that I would have done anything he asked me. We met at a time when we each needed someone—someone who could deepen us, who we could change with, who we could become. That was how it was. And each of us was the one the other one wanted. I was, after all, an art groupie, because I loved being with painters, w
riters, photographers, illustrators, designers, and often because that turned me on I would want to get closer. I wasn’t interested if there was no vision. There had to be something that kept me interested. He wanted a living person to whom he could apply his ideas, about desire, blackness, primitive cultures, image, control, someone who was prepared to make their body available. He needed a volunteer.
It is very difficult to say what came first—the two of us starting a romantic relationship or us starting a creative relationship. I think the two things happened simultaneously. As soon as he started to photograph and draw me, we were together. As soon as we kissed, we were together. As soon as we started talking—Toukie would be in the next room, and we would be talking—we brain-fucked each other, but we didn’t have sex.
It was all very innocent, and then it wasn’t. When we would secretly hang out together around Times Square we were sublimating sexual tension behind so-called research trips into the sleazy. Eventually, we became our own peep show.
Some people think we were collaborating from the beginning, but there were three disco albums before Jean-Paul Goude and I started working together. And “La Vie en Rose” had already been a big hit by the time he appeared.
The first three albums were with Richard, who treated photos by Antonio Lopez and a photographer, Francis Ing, who would take photos of me in New York that were the perfect background for Richard’s freely scrawled pencil strokes. That was a different style of enchantment, reflecting the world as it was at the time in New York and Paris, in the clubs, in the night, in the world and Factory of Warhol, the unraveling of a very specific form of surface energy.