Grace Jones – Slave to the Rhythm
1985 · Directed by Jean-Paul Goude
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Best comments
1.“She was the internet before the internet knew what it wanted to be... except the cat things.”
More comments
- 2.“I remember this album cover when I was little. This woman scared the SHIT out of me.”
- 3.“During a recent show she hula-hooped for 6 minutes straight while singing this live. She's 75!”
The story
Here's a music video with zero new footage of its star. Jean-Paul Goude, Grace Jones's boyfriend at the time, built it out of things already in the can: clips from her videos for My Jamaican Guy, Living My Life and I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango), scenes from her concert film A One Man Show, still photos of her best-known looks and her TV ad for the Citroën CX. Actor Ian McShane narrates over the top.
It opens with a pair of hands cutting up a Polaroid of Jones, chopping and stretching it until her face and mouth reach proportions no human has. That's how Goude made the album cover, a montage of copies of one photograph, and the video shows the trick with a before-and-after. It ends darker, with Living My Life footage edited so Jones collapses and dies. i-D read the whole thing as Goude's picture of Jones the outsider. Goude later admitted he got jealous and possessive of the character he created through her, more than of the real woman.
The song was first meant for Frankie Goes to Hollywood until producer Trevor Horn reworked it for Jones. The album is a concept record billed as a biography, eight different takes on the same song stitched between interviews and McShane's readings. The single hit number 12 in the UK and number one on Billboard's dance club chart, The Face called it the best single of 1985, and the video lost Best Female Video at the 1986 MTV VMAs to Whitney Houston. Katy Perry's Chained to the Rhythm sits elsewhere in the Weirdness. Grace beat her to the rhythm by 32 years.
