GRACE JONES IS LIKE A FATHER TO ME

GRACE JONES IS LIKE A FATHER TO ME

By STEPHEN MICHAELS

I remember the first time I saw her face move. Flat, in profile, covered by prismatic colorful shapes. Very slowly, white-gloved hands enter the shot from offscreen, pulling apart the costume, revealing staunch rouged cheekbones, glossy red lips, and a severely striking stare. Libertango. “Strange, I’ve seen that face before…” 

I was eleven or twelve; it was seventh grade. I was a pretty depressed kid, still in the closet… and the door was glass. I was alone a lot and on Tumblr all the time. My age perfectly lined me up with the height of Tumblr, between the death of MySpace and the dawn of Facebook. I was teased at school for being too effeminate, and Tumblr was somewhere I could hide and indulge in visual fantasy, where I could obsess over what I loved and be shown new things I would come to love. It made me adventurous and hungry to learn about culture and beauty.

In middle school, I listened to a lot of music. I loved The Smiths, Green Day, Crystal Castles, and I loved metal bands like Avenged Sevenfold. I’d listen to them with headphones in the cafeteria at lunch so loud you could hear the music bleeding out. I wanted everyone to know I was listening to loud, scary music. I also obviously had plenty of gay-ass-music secretly downloaded to my iPod, but was often too embarrassed then to listen to that in public. Through movies and the internet, I developed my own interests in genre, in the counterculture of it all. I remember I started listening to The Cure after googling something along the lines of “what music should you listen to if you’re goth.” 

My parents always shared music with my brother and me. I have early memories of listening to Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, and the B-52’s on family car rides. I used to think everyone’s parents played music for their kids. With a real eye roll towards it, I thought that the music they chose was mostly gauche, too old and disconnected from me to really appreciate. That is until one day I learned that my dad, who owns organized drawers full of CDs and records, was actually interested in weird music, in cool music, in music that spoke to me the same way it spoke to him when it came out, the way it might speak to him now, the way it will speak to him and I both even years from now. 

So there I was, at the family desktop scrolling through images on Tumblr, when I saw her face for the very first time. I remember reblogging the cover of her album Nightclubbing, thinking that it was such an intensely beautiful photograph. I wanted to see more of that face, those eyes, that stare. 

I went on youtube and searched for her name. I watched “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).” I loved the strange electronic filter on the accordion, and I was blown away as the camera slowly panned out to reveal the Parisian skyline. I scrolled through Youtube a bit more and found Grace Jones - A One Man Show (1982). I thought to myself, One Man Show? Is this person a man? Now, I was even more intrigued. At a time when I still didn’t understand what genderbending could be, it confused me. I had some conceptual awareness of drag queens, and I knew about glam rock icons like Kiss and David Bowie, but those were men who were performing to be effeminate, or as women, not women being masculine or… manly. This was something new to me, something much more baffling to a gay seventh grader than glitter and makeup and platforms. 

My dad, hearing the music blasting from the computer speakers, pulled up at the desktop alongside me. He started to tell me more about her, how she was this powerful figure in pop culture, how people were frightened of her, how her song Private Life is really a cover of The Pretenders. It meant something to me then, and it means even more to me now, to share this admiration for Grace with him. It made me happy that my dad got it, that we got it together. He went on to encourage me to listen to her more, eventually helping me to hang a vinyl-sized picture frame I bought for her record Living My Life, so her jagged portrait would watch over me. It still hangs on the wall of my childhood bedroom today. 

There is nobody like Grace Jones, and there is nobody who could ever be. She is a product of a culture of free expression, and she expresses more freely than nearly anyone who’s ever lived. She is everything because…she is everything. Whether performing as a clownish jester or a sex kitten seductress, she consistently communicates with a rich sensuality towards life. 

On her album covers and in her music videos, she proudly expresses her body in caricature, evoking hard truths through racialized symbolism and radicalizing the profane. In turn, she manipulated the history of representation for Black women in popular culture--especially dark-skinned Black women. She’s never been afraid to reference violently cartoonish, minstrel-esque imagery; instead, she owns it, illustrating herself as a product of all the culture that came before her--even the parts that are hard to look at and ugly to remember. 

She’s bold; she’s cutting edge; she’s sharp-tongued and dripped down in elegant fashions. She uses her body as a canvas—literally, in the case of the famous Keith Haring body paint--but also through truly avant garde clothing from designers like Issey Miyake and Thierry Mugler, designers adored for their uncanny ability to alter the shape of the body, to create beauty that was beyond the contemporary moment, fellow artists who built the future through ideas laden with history. She has always been a shapeshifter, ten steps ahead of us all. 

“Feeling like a woman, looking like a man…” she sings in "Walking in the Rain.” In the years that have passed since I discovered her, I have come to understand gender expression as something playful, as infinite potentiality, a way to manipulate signifiers, perception, and identity. We are not to be identified just by what we look like, but we are also not just identified by how we feel internally. For Grace, it’s always been about taking declarative power over others' preconceptions, about self-determination, freedom, and the joyful playfulness of it all. She uses beauty and severity to frighten the close-minded monoculture. As a kid, she even frightened me, enough to change my perception of self, my perception of performance, and enough to hope for a world where it could all be possible for me, too. Really, it's always been about the desire to be fabulous. 

My father, who is certainly a straight man, is not alpha-hyper-masculine, but instead has shown me a positive role model of masculinity that includes dedicated fatherhood, open-mindedness, an acceptance of all peoples, an appreciation for history, for creative expression, and certainly an appreciation for rock and roll. 

Grace Jones is, hands down, one of the greatest living artists. I admire her so deeply. The more I learn about her, the more compelling she is. Read her incredible autobiography. Watch her interviews with Joan Rivers and her insane music videos. (Slave to the Rhythm is my favorite.) Or, just listen to her music. La Vie en Rose, The Hunter Gets Captured by the Prey, Pull Up to the Bumper, My Jamaican Guy. I hope to live my life with half the vivaciousness she carries in one finger. To live “La Vie en Rose.” I strive to capture the sharpness of her wit, the sheer power of her confidence, and the fierceness of her fabulosity. She sets a powerful example. She’s like a father to me, and for that, I can thank my father.