Compilations and greatest hits packages are almost never on my “to buy” list. I prefer owning the original LPs and getting the benefit of all the filler cuts and hidden gems they hold. That’s why I’ve never bough a copy of Jamaican-born model/actress/singer Grace Jones‘ 1985 disc Island Life, a collection of some of her more memorable work with the Island Records label up to that point.
I’d see Island Life around, but I always operated under the rationale that purchasing her albums individually when I happened to find them was preferable. How many of her other albums do you think I’ve actually come across in my travels though? That would be zero. So, when I saw a still-sealed copy of Island Life in the dollar bin at that record sale a few weeks ago I finally broke down and copped it on general principal.
Even amidst the Glam, Disco and Art-Punk/New Wave scenes of the late ’70s and early ’80s, with all their shine, androgyny and angular fashionability, Jones cut a striking figure. How could a near 6-foot-tall Caribbean Amazon wearing short-cropped hair, stylized make-up and runway chic fashion not? That image was fostered in part with the support and assistance of French designer and photographer Jean-Paul Goude, with whom Jones had a son, Paolo. And it’s all on display in their physics-defying cover art for Island Life, as iconic an image of the female form in music as any Ohio Players album cover in my estimation.
The disc wrapped in that image collects examples of Jones’ diverse musical output released between 1977 and 1985.
The tracks from her earliest period like “La Vie en Rose,” “I Need a Man” and “Do or Die” were produced by seminal Disco remixer & producer Tom Moulton using a team of seasoned sessioners (including Wilbur “Bad” Bascomb, Bobby Eli, Vince Montana and John Davis) and are, with one exception, exemplary of the pounding percussion, soaring strings and sexually aggressive but still ambiguous lyricism of the era. The one tune that eschews the trappings of Disco, a cover of the Edith Piaf composition “La Vie en Rose,” is a welcome change of pace, with it’s subdued French vocal and orchestral arrangement over a sputtering drum machine sounding like the perfect mix of continental Pop, South American rhythms & space-age Lounge music and putting Jones in a league with artists like Sade and Everything But the Girl who were soon to hit the scene.
At the turn of the decade she teamed up with Island head-honcho Chris Blackwell and Alex Sadkin, which changed her sound significantly. That portion of her career, which saw her indulging in Reggae and New Wave-influenced Post-Disco, is well represented here. As you might expect, club classics like the rubbery synth-Funk workout “Pull Up To the Bumper” and the sparse Electro-Dub dancefloor grinder “My Jamaican Guy” are both here. But other lesser-known tracks from the era like “Walking In the Rain” and “Private Life,” were Jones acerbically spits sarcastic spoken word over languid and luxuriously smooth Reggae rhythms, are just as ear-catching, coming off like cosmopolitan cousins to some of Lee Perry’s spoken-word-esque productions, a less righteous, more fashionable Linton Kwesi Johnson, and a precedent to the work of more contemporary dancefloor poets.
I still hope to find the original entry’s in Grace Jones’ catalog, but it was about time I copped Island Life. If not to have easily dispensable vinyl for joints like “Bumper” and “Jamaican Guy” handy then to have a clean copy of that smooth-n-shiny cover-art I’ve oggled so many times up in my house somewhere.
- El Keter