by Grace Jones
He was right. After they heard it, the Capitol people stopped bickering. Of course, what I didn’t anticipate when I signed to Capitol, especially after having been on Island, was that even though I’d been granted creative control in the contract, they didn’t ask for my approval of the record sleeve and went ahead and printed what they wanted. I wanted Keith Haring to design the artwork on the first official album I recorded for them after the Trevor Horn project, but when the album was released, the cover was a very commercial photograph by Greg Gorman—a photo I originally shot for a drink commercial, a total contrast to an album containing specific, personal emotions and confessions. I loved shooting with Greg. He had built his entire studio purely for the light, and would always use me to test a new piece of equipment, but it wasn’t what I wanted for the album. A nice photo, but not what I expected, and not what I had worked on with Keith—a very moving, very avant-primitive image, totally from inside his world, and therefore completely, brilliantly unique. Capitol should have been so lucky as to have one of their record sleeves done by an artist as respected and successful as Keith Haring. Their image was attractive but sanitized. Keith’s would have been more cutting, more comical, and more energetic—more me. It would have been me telling my own story, which consistently involved being interpreted and reimagined by a great artist, and not them telling their story of me, which was very perfunctory.
After Island, this was quite a shock, that something so important to who I was and what I did would be treated so flippantly and without me being consulted. It was an early sign that they misunderstood me. They saw me as representing the world of fashion, still the celebrity model/singer, the haywire Studio 54 chanteuse, not someone who was always experimenting with herself and taking responsibility for every detail of her work.
I had some demos from working with Bruce Woolley, one of the writers of “Slave to the Rhythm,” that could almost have been released as they were. Nile was very in demand at the time, though, and Bruce wasn’t known to Capitol as a producer. The record company wanted the profile. They wanted big hits, with no messing about. And Nile had the profile. He was known to deliver quickly and have success. Bruce or I should have asserted ourselves, maybe coproduced the album with Nile, but Capitol bulldozed us a little. Nothing against Nile, of course, he loved the material, but we already had momentum and knew what we wanted. I wasn’t in a position to push them. I could write with whomever I wanted, but they wanted to choose the producer, and at that point in my new situation, I didn’t have the power to get what I wanted.
Nile was great, but he was working very hard at that point. He was burning out, working on a lot of records. That year alone he produced records by Laurie Anderson, Duran Duran, Bryan Ferry, Al Jarreau. The year before he had worked with Mick Jagger, the Thompson Twins, Jeff Beck, and Sheena Easton. It was as if I was next on the conveyor belt. He did the album so fast, inside a month—Trevor had taken twelve times that amount to produce Slave to the Rhythm—and a lot of the material never felt finished. You could feel the rush. He was in a hurry. He had a schedule. Bits of his mind were elsewhere.
When I listen to Inside Story, I can hear the energy of what was going on the moment it was made. It is different from Nightclubbing, different from Slave to the Rhythm, but I listen to that record, and I love it. It’s where I was at the time. Nile’s ear was different from mine, and he was responding to his idea of me, and it was an American Nile production, with all that entails, but I think it is beautiful. There were other ways of doing that material, but I like how it ended up.
I don’t listen to all my records, but I play that one a lot, because it is interesting to hear what Nile was thinking. I will do some homework, if I am performing and need to remember the lyrics, but I don’t play my albums when I am alone. I listen to them with friends, when I am on tour, but mostly, I know those records, and I don’t need to keep hearing them.
* * *
We got Fela Kuti involved. I had been obsessed with his music since I had gone to Paris, where you would hear it a lot. Years later I went to Monte Carlo. I used to go there with Keith Haring and Helmut Newton. I was there with a boyfriend, and he knew someone who knew how to get to Fela Kuti. I said, “I want to work with him, can you get him?” And I got Fela! I introduced him to Nile, who didn’t really know who he was. But I wanted to take Nile out of his usual American patterns.
Fela didn’t do much—I don’t think he quite understood what I wanted. He just tried to marry me and my sister Pam. Pam had decided to move in with me at the time. She has a brilliant mind. She had quit Harvard because she got bored and didn’t want to turn out like all the other students. She had a kind of eight-year itch, was a little restless with her life in general, and asked if she could work with me. She effectively started co-managing me. I was managing myself, with Chris Blackwell on the side, and various business advisers. After Sy and Eileen as ma-and-pa managers, I started to manage myself, because I felt that if I was going to have to argue with my management then it would become a tug-of-war and wouldn’t make sense. It would just have been one more annoying layer of people not understanding where I wanted to go or why.
You get a lot of things thrown at you—do jerk sauce commercials, advertise cigars—and I would call Chris and he would always say, “Stick to what you know. Otherwise, as soon as you reach the top, everyone wants you to do something, and they can pull you down. There is a lot of money there, but in the end it is always a distraction from the music.” And over time, I had become addicted to the music even though that hadn’t been my original intention. Even with film there was a point where I had to decide between that and music. The Capitol contract I signed was so intense it was hard to do both. If I did a film, I wouldn’t have time to properly promote a music project.
Fela was in the studio while we worked on Inside Story, but all he wanted to do was seduce Pam and me. Nile didn’t then realize who he was—it wasn’t his area—so as far as he could see, there was this strange guy trying to pick me up, not an absolute musical living legend. Fela didn’t do a bit of work. He would put his arm around me. We wined and dined at Mr. Chow in New York, to no avail. It’s such a missed opportunity, but I tried my best. He just didn’t want to play along.
Eventually I got to work with his drummer, Tony Allen, on the Hurricane album, when I was in a better place—so it did work out, because what I loved most about Fela was always that rhythm. It was more fitting for Hurricane, because that was an album that was as much about drumming up the voices of my ancestors as anything. My mother sang on that record, one of the reasons it was so important to me. It came out of Jamaica, and how that was out of Africa, and how that was out of this world, rather than being out of disco.
A video directed by Nick Hooker for “Corporate Cannibal” from this album showed how far out from disco, and even post-disco, and fashion, I had gone. It was why I enjoyed making the album with Ivor, and having a free-form group of musicians that included Tricky, Brian Eno, and Tony Allen from their own free-form studio ensembles producing a music that slipped through and around obvious genres. No one had caught up with what I had done at Compass Point and with Jean-Paul, and in this video I am stretching myself further, beyond the reach of those thinking they are being inspired by me. I am not decoration; I am pure signal. I transmit. The video says, yes, it is about entertainment, art, performance, advertising, controversy, the transferring of extreme imaginative energy, about maintaining creative freedom by living at the very edge of uncertainty, but above all, it is about pure consciousness.
Capitol had wanted me to be set in stone; the fluidity of Hurricane is more reflective of my temperament and how far I was along the road and yet still beginning. It is about existing in a world where images are the most vivid of realities, a world where any point can be connected to any other point. It was something I started to learn with Issey, Andy, and Jean-Paul.
My presence, my body, in the “Cannibal” video is distorted, and elongated, and cloned, so t
here is a connection to how I was broken apart and transformed over twenty-five years before. I have moved on, though, even though I am still no age at all, pure force spreading out into the world as technologies grow. I am keeping up with whatever I need to keep up with without it looking like I am trying to merely stay up-to-date.
I am still a monster, still a rare, troubling beauty, still beyond body, still naked; there seems to be nothing in the world outside me, I am still in my very own space and time. I am still moving as an energy, and perhaps that is what I have become, an energy that belongs in ancient Egypt as much as it belongs inside a limitless machine.
The album with Niles was more fixed in the time it was made, and is, if anything, about glossiness, and consumerism, and fame, and what happened to the spirit of disco at the height of ’80s glamour in a world that had sweetened it and eaten it up like cake. When it came out, Inside Story wasn’t behind the times, it was ahead of them, peering forward to Daft Punk, not looking back to Studio 54. If we’d had more time, I think the concept would have been clearer. We had a hit in America with one track from the record, “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You.)” It wasn’t an international hit, so it didn’t make Capitol as happy as they wanted to be, considering the size of the contract.
I’d gotten the idea while Mick Jagger and I were playing off each other, which was something we often did when we met. Our flirting was often done through games and wordplay, and frolicking about like brother and sister behind our parents’ backs. I had been filming Conan in Mexico, and the Stones were there making a video. We were thrown together one day in the same studio complex. I ran into the Stones a lot—we were often in the same place at the same time.
Mick and I started talking about the idea of being in a relationship when you are famous, and having to be as perfect for your partner as you are as a performer. We had an idea for a song. He said, “You do one line, I’ll do one line.” In the end, we only got two lines: I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for you. That’s as far as we got! I said, “I’ll take it on and finish it off.” He never asked for credit or anything. I completed it by imagining what me and Mick would have done.
Because the track was so personal, I decided I would direct the video for the song, having learned so much, especially from Jean-Paul. It was a retort, in a way, to not being able to live up to the image that my lover had literally created for me, so it seemed important that I be in control of the video, rather than act as the subject. It ended up being completely out of my control.
It was so hard to do. Not the directing itself but working with Capitol. They were a corporate company, so there were all these people breathing down my neck at the time, unconvinced that I knew what I was doing. They were very music industry, and I was trying to do something ambitious and conceptual, using all of my contacts, who were delighted to help me.
I had to struggle to get respect from the Capitol people. I was in every shot, so I would always have my makeup touched up in a room away from the studio. And when I came back they would be shooting something, or having the cast change clothes. I would say, “What’s going on? I am the director. I know what I am doing.” I got very paranoid. The Capitol people were all whispering behind my back, undermining me. It was deeply ironic considering what the video is about, but I don’t think they had the first idea I was actually making any kind of comment in the video.
I had to be a bitch to maintain any kind of authority. Well, if I were a man, I wouldn’t have been considered a bitch. If I were a man, I would simply have been in charge, however aggressive and demanding I was. I wouldn’t have had other people running about filming things behind my back. A man putting his foot down is in control. It’s strong. A woman putting her foot down is out of control. She’s weak.
In the video, I am the ultimate primal diva under pressure to stay youthful, going through all the painful, intrusive processes of self-healing and beautification—mud baths, waxing of body hair, acupuncture to repel aging around the eyes, violent massage, near drowning in a milk bath, and a nightmare psychotherapy session. Many of those treating me are sinister, Mas P sort of characters, witnesses for the defense, so to speak, testifying to my actual perfection. I submit to all the treatments in a state of desperation because I know I must stay on the path to perfection, because that is my job. I go through all the tasks you need to go through to be ready for a performance.
It’s all a metaphor for how Jean-Paul rearranged me, as a combination of advert and art, because to look like one of his impossible Graces, these are the processes I would have to go through in real life. I would be pummeled, invaded, electrocuted, suffocated, bleached, blackened, dissected, and skinned in order to become such a fantasy, wild- or blank-eyed and ready for action.
I had gotten Richard Bernstein to storyboard the video on my living room wall in New York. I had learned the importance of a storyboard in working on my videos, and I would always learn from whomever the director of photography was when I was acting. I remember there was one famous DP on Conan the Destroyer, Jack Cardiff; he’d worked on Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, Girl on a Motorcycle—so many great movies. He loved that I wanted to learn and was always showing me things. He was very funny. I think he liked my strong perfume, which he could smell as I leaned over him to look through his lens. I think he also liked the very skimpy suede bikini they had given me to wear as Zula.
The character was a fierce, no-nonsense warrior and bandit, with a hint of vulnerability, so I had the necessary qualifications for the role. As strong and powerful as Zula was meant to be, the wardrobe department had made a costume for me where you could see the whole crack of my ass. I thought that was pushing it a bit, but once you have signed on, you have little say in what you wear. Hollywood sees a dynamic, murderous female outlaw as being obviously dressed like an irate stripper. I found this furry rabbit’s tail, and I stuck that over the top of my bikini bottom, so that covered me up a little. You could only see anything if I swung my tail, which at least gave me a little control over how and when you got an eyeful.
I had hired Keith Haring as my assistant director, to help make a more dramatic, and dignified, outfit for the “Perfect” video. He was in Paris. We sent him the storyboard, and he filmed his part separately there. It was beautiful. He rented a huge space and painted the whole floor. The floor became part of my skirt, white, sixty feet wide, because I am so manipulated and extended, and so diva aloof, covered in Keith’s playful abstract symbols. I go up in a lift and all these therapists, cosmetologists, and stylists, all my admirers and worshippers, those that celebrate me and those that manipulate me, go underneath my skirt, so that I devour them inside of me.
He did his piece and sent it, and we connected it to my part. His part was amazing, and we sped him up painting the floor. Eventually he is stuck in the middle of his own painting. He was so fast and so spontaneous when he painted. They would appear in real time, these amazing shapes and lines and patterns. When he was not available for a small reshoot of the paint appearing, we hired someone who was also meant to be an expert, and she took fourteen hours to paint what Keith had painted in a few minutes. His hand-eye coordination was absolutely extraordinary.
We had a lot of guest stars in the video. Andy was in it—it was the last filming he participated in before he died. He was always so enthusiastic: What are you guys up to? What are you doing? One day I said, “Well, I am doing a video for ‘I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You).’ I’m directing it, Keith is helping, come down.” Andy played Andy, turning up to say, “Grace is perfect.” He is, of course, the perfect person to say such a thing, in such a video, all about the corruption, commercialization, and delusions, of perfection. Speaking of perfect, I had Timothy Leary play my psychiatrist. I’m rolling on the floor freaking out in panic as he calms me down.
Tina Chow gives me acupuncture. She was my “aesthetician.” I wanted Divine to be my masseuse, but he passed away a little while before we filmed the video.
It was a complicated shoot. I had been apprenticed to Jean-Paul, after all. I knew that preproduction was important. I had asked for two weeks to do the whole thing, and they chopped the production down first to three days and then two. It was so much pressure. After I finished, I vowed that I would never direct anything again. I know that I should never say never, and that with the right people in the right circumstances it is something I might want to do, but they made it such a nightmare. Instead of having a week in which to edit, I had two days. I was never really given a chance. They treated me as though I was a temperamental, unstable mess, and were so impatient and intolerant it did start to seem to those close to me that I was genuinely going mad.
* * *
There was a plot to put me away in a facility, because people thought I was on the edge of insanity. There was an actual conspiracy to have me sectioned. It wasn’t in my head, although, naturally, it was made to seem as though it was. I was being worn down. The circumstances were making me crazy, not mad. I was simply frustrated to such an extent about how the video was going, people thought I was in mental trouble.
My sister, my mom, my dad, Capitol Records—a weird alliance, whose members cared about me from different corners—could easily have convinced people that I had lost all sense of logic, that I was losing touch with reality. My family felt I was being paranoid, but I wasn’t going mad. In truth, I was deeply upset that Capitol was interfering with my vision. I was not being a prima donna: I was just trying to concentrate on a technically difficult task while I was being talked to like I was a silly pop singer who’d gotten carried away with her own ego.