The cost of that decision was leaving a lucrative career for one that paid nothing upfront. Jones moved into music with a sound that nobody had heard before. Her early disco albums sold modestly, but it was not until she connected with producer Sly Dunbar and the Compass Point All-Stars in the Bahamas that she found her voice. The albums Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life -- recorded between 1980 and 1982 -- created a sound that was part reggae, part new wave, part funk, and entirely unsettling in the best way. The rhythm section of Sly and Robbie locked into grooves that felt mechanical and human at the same time. Jones's vocal came in somewhere between a chant and a command.
Pull Up to the Bumper is the one. That bassline, the deadpan vocal, the double-entendre that was so obvious it wrapped around to art -- the song became an underground classic and then a mainstream hit. She followed it with Private Life and Walking in the Rain, each track starker than the last. Jean-Paul Goude, her partner and director, created the visual language that matched the music: the geometric silhouettes, the angular poses, the body painted and boxed and made into sculpture.
The 1986 film Vamp put her on screen. The James Bond theme for A View to a Kill proved she could work inside the machine without being flattened by it.
Grace Jones is still operating at seventy-six, still performing in the same leather jackets and angular cuts, still refusing to be comfortable. She did not build a career. She built an icon, and the icon has outlived every category the industry tried to put her in. The fashion world could not frame her. The music industry could not genre her. The film industry could not typecast her. She is not a singer who models or a model who acts. She is Grace Jones, and the only category that holds her is the one she invented for herself.
Grace Jones was profiled in the documentary, Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami, in 2017.
