Slave to the rhythm

Press, 30 January 1986, Page 18

Slave to the rhythm

In pop music, major stardom is increasingly a matter of creating and sustaining an exotic cartoonlike character. Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, and Tina Turner are pop icons whose comic-book selfpresentation may have as much to do with their popularity as their musical talent.

androgynous, aggressive female warrior in a flattop haircut. And her voice, which she described as a “contraltobaritone,” suggests an AfroAmerican answer to Marlene Dietrich with Ethel Merman’s assertiveness.

Jones recently released two albums and has also completed most of the songs for another record to be made in New York in April with Nile Rodgers, the producer of Madonna’s “Like A Virgin.”

In 1986, Grace Jones, the Jamaican-born fashion model, turned pop singer, seems likely to join them in the rockfantasy firmament. She has cultivated a public persona that has titillated movie audiences in “Conan the Destroyer” and the James Bond film “A View To A Kill,” while developing a vocal personality that is ominously compelling. The 32-year-old singer, who achieved notoriety as a disco cult figure in the late 19705, is a caricature of dangerous chic — an

The anthology, “Island Life,” chronicles Jones’ career from disco diva growling “I Need A Man” into a more sophisticated interpreter of songs by Bryan Ferry and The Pretenders. The anthology’s high point is “Libertango,” an evocative hybrid of Jamaican reggae, tango and accordion-laced French bistro music, interwoven with singing and dramatic monologue spoken in French.

The singer’s other new record, “Slave To The Rhythm,” is a fascinating album-length extension of her latest single. Made with Trevor Horn, a fashionably English dance-rock producer, who helped Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the song invokes the relationships between industrial and biological rhythms in a majestic hybrid of funk and reggae. On the album, the singer “models” different versions of the song and

STEPHEN HOLDEN,

By

of the “New York Times”

of herself, while others comment hyperbolically.

“When we made Slave To The Rhythm, we only intended to record the single, but during the session we started experimenting and ended up with eight different versions of the song,” Jones said. ; ■-<

“It was so interesting that we decided to put eight together on an album. It’s a three-dimen-sional concept that friends tell me reminds them of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon.

Jones has taken up songwriting only quite recently. One of the high points of “Island Life” is an original lyric. “My Jamaican Guy,” written in a Jamaican patois. “I’ve written ail the lyrics for my next album, which is going to be very autobiographical — it’s tentatively called “The Inside Story,” Jones said. “I came from a very strict background and didn’t hear any Jamaican music when! was growing up. Then when I was 12 I moved to Syracuse, New York, so my musical influences came from America in the late 19605. I’m studying voice, but I still don’t think of myself as a singer. “I want to explore even further the idea of mak-. ing records that are total concepts.

“I want to be adventurous, to take things a step further and find a whole new feeling,” she said.