The one opportunity that will always loom large over Grace Jones: “Very competitive as artists”
“I like to leave a little mystery,” Grace Jones once said, and while you might assume she was talking about her art, she was actually talking about an instance during the pandemic when she was detained at an airport. Jones didn’t want to say which country, she explained, because that’s part of the fun: the enigma.
Indeed, this doesn’t really reveal anything new about Jones other than what we already knew: she’s a wild card, a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules, especially the unspoken ones. She turns up to high-profile weddings late because she wants a change of clothes; she never performs concerts without being paid upfront, and she shows television hosts who’s boss when they ruffle her feathers by ignoring her and making her feel small.
But she does like to leave a little mystery everywhere she goes, not just in these isolated incidents but in every corner of her music. It’s the reason why we’re still drawn to records like Nightclubbing like insatiable vultures who can’t get enough: there’s a darkened pattern of sonic secrecy there, sparked the moment it feels like Jones is descending upon us like a silhouetted alleyway figure and extending into what it means to be an androgynous force of excellence, “Whistling in the darkness, shining in the night.”
Maybe that’s because nightclubbing by nature signals something deeper in the underbelly of society and consciousness, an alternative universe that thrives on its own fleeting nature, where it’s okay to succumb to our darkest, most hedonistic desires because it’s all temporary – existing outside of real society, where it’s all about the pleasures of disorder. Or, the temptations of sexual desire alluded to in ‘Pull Up to the Bumper’, like, “In your long black limousine / Pull up to my bumper baby / And drive it in between.”
But all of these examples of artistic mystique are merely the seeds that point towards a far-from-perfect architect who’s more human than any of her peers, who makes mistakes and encounters slip-ups in spite of her perfectionism and fight to maintain control, and who probably ruminates on the lost opportunities in her career more than you might expect of someone so fierce in the face of contention. At least, that’s how it feels to look at someone who’d prefer to live explosively, remembered extensively, “As the whole tequila, worm and everything.”
And so, her biggest regret isn’t anything she’s done musically, but rather something she didn’t do when the opportunity crossed her path: an offer to appear in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Speaking to The Guardian, she said: “My biggest regret is not doing Blade Runner. Jean-Paul Goude – my son’s dad – and Ridley Scott were very competitive as artists. Ridley wanted me to play a snake lady, but Jean-Paul was very French and didn’t like to share.”
At the time, it was Jones’ unwavering loyalty to her then-partner Goude that influenced her decision to turn it down, even though she knew at the time that this would be the one choice that would surely rocket her to Hollywood stardom, painting her name in neon lights and cementing her place in film history. But his coercion to make her think it would be “too commercial” or make her “a sellout” was soon overpowered when she read the script and identified with the story, noticing how it mirrored much of what she explored in her own work.
“I still had the script, though, and the night after I had passed on the part, I was flying to Paris,” she explained in her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. “I decided to read it on the plane. I absolutely loved it. It was set in a universe I visited a lot in my work and play. As soon as I landed, I decided I would call them back and reverse my decision. I was too late. Overnight, they had cast someone else.”
Usually, it’s easy to sidestep such blunders among actors or musicians, but there’s no doubt that Jones would have thrived in Scott’s universe, as if it were created solely for her. Her artistic, conniving persona, unreadable and oftentimes unsettling presence, and endearing mystique would have no doubt been entirely at home, her character coming to life as a powerful, avant-garde presence that was as fitting under the film’s futuristic aesthetic as the unidentifiable entity pervading her magnum opus.
