Grace appeared first on the disco scene, through the Parisian fashion lines and gay clubs, so she did not lack frivolity and boldness to behave very differently. That’s why she could not have been strange in the world of pop music, because the Anderground clubbing of the seventies was the new boundaries of all possible excesses. In its cover, it was, as androgynous, the appearance of black skin color, the performed stance, the steel look and the voice tired of the cynicism of the environment.
In an unbelievable blend of what just happened once, this Jamaican born child, grown up in Philadelphia and New York, and definitely succeeded in Paris, became a favorite of world arty circles, and especially Jane Polo Gude, an outstanding graphic designer with a postmodern sense of humor. Long ago obsessed with the beauty of black women and jungle muses, Gude recognized in Johnson a new cultural icon, a person who calls into question the established order of things.
When launched on the scene, it is launched as a pop sculpture, moving through time and space according to its laws.
The Warm Leatheratte album announced its potential to sign the masterpiece of pop and pop music with “Nightclubbing”, which has set an unprecedented standard in songs, styling and production to date … but also much more – in the way who was treated by women in the pop market.
Grace was among the first to be treated the way that successful boys were sometimes treated on the music scene: she was given a character, which will last with time. Like full of mysteries and strength … nothing in its appearance has revealed the existence of any possibility of standing in its way. Men who until then had a successful solo star had exciting biographies, lived a glamorous life, appeared in various roles that only added to their seduction. Women were mostly reserved stereotypes, which did not recognize anything more than the bereaved sexuality of the bad girls or the loyal commitment to the beauty of the song of good girls. Grace smashed that mold, so it never compiled.
Things in these routine roles began to change and contradict the appearance of Jennifer Joplin and her blues life, then Johnny Michelle, who was the undeniable author and voice of the generation, and Grace Slick of Jefferson Erlene, who rolled the entire revolutionary rock band on his back – all three at the end of the sixties and at the beginning of the seventies defined the new femininity she brought with her and the right to choose and dictate the rules of the game. However, it took a long time before real equality came to an end. She came in the shape of three heroics of the “new wave” – Blonde, Pete Smith and Grease Jones.
Unlike the previous, the hippie generation, which has highly evaluated everything unskilled and real, searching for real feelings and freedom in life, punks and new-age times turned out to be all organically lost to industrial products. Fifth Smith continued to maintain counter-cultural dreams with her poetry career, but one had to stay at the scene, never to experience great circulation; however, Blondie and Grace Jones were an indication of the new times and the first female pop projects that came out on the market with a created character that seemed to have been created to simultaneously stuff televisions with pure seduction, twisting our brains, ordering something seriously and leaving us imagined.
Each of her exits on the scene is precisely why a social event of a particular type, and not just a musical and spectacular spectacle – that is the event on which a new type of self-knowledge is acquired.
Grace Jones performs at the EXIT Festival on Saturday 14.7. at the Main Stage at 23:15.
