I'll Never Write My Memoirs

Zusatztext
"Jones' memoir reads like one long provocation, punctuated by boasts of sexual insatiability, entitled demands, and commanding declarations ("I am my own sugar daddy!"). Even the title of her book courts the contrary. What's not to like?"

Informationen zum Autor
Performer, actress, and musician Grace Jones has been making a name for herself since she left Jamaica as a twelve-year-old in the 1960s. First finding fame as a fashion model in the early 1970s, then as a sensational disco queen during the Studio 54 years, she is as much surrealist as showgirl, as much performance artist as party animal. She has been Bond villain and Warhol confidante, post-modern icon and avant-garde pop star. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs is her first book.Writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic PAUL MORLEY has written about music, art, and entertainment since the 1970s. A founding member of the electronic collective Art of Noise and a member of staff at the Royal Academy of Music, he is the author of Ask: Chatter of Pop; Words and Music: A History of Pop in the Shape of a City; Piece by Piece: Writing About Joy Division 1977–2007; Earthbound; The North; and Nothing, and he collaborated with music icon Grace Jones on her memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.

Leseprobe
I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
 

1.

Spanish Town

I was born.

It happened one day, when I least expected it, on an island measuring only 4,411 square miles, a teeming mountainous land of wood and water among a chain of islands in the center of the Caribbean Sea at the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. That wondrous isle in the western seas.

I came out of my mother feetfirst. I arrived kicking and pissed off, sticky with fury, soaked to the skin. I was what’s known as a stargazing fetus as well, my neck fully extended. From the very beginning I was going against the grain and making trouble. Perhaps I was holding on to my mother for dear life, somehow knowing what was about to happen next. I didn’t want to leave the one place I had felt at home, where I had been floating for so long, and enter the darkness. Inside, there was light. Outside, instantly, the unknown. The cord was cut. Startled by a strange newness, I didn’t immediately make much of a noise, so I was slapped and slapped, to prove that I was normal. I cried out. I’ll show you noise. I’ll show you normal. I shrieked. In my own uprooted newborn way, I probably cursed.

Here I am.

Grace Beverly Jones. As was the custom, I would be known by my second name. Beverly. Bev. Later, when I was four or five, my skin was so charcoal black I would be engulfed when the warm, sultry night fell, throbbing with nature and a slithering hint of the supernatural. My nickname then was Firefly. You could only make out my eyes and teeth, sparkling in the dark.

My new home outside my mother was Spanish Town, the oldest continually habituated town in Jamaica. Five hundred and fifty years of history, starting a few years after the island of Jamaica was first found—“discovered”—by a Christopher Columbus of Italy in charge of exploring and marauding Spaniards. As St. Jago de la Vega, the town on the plains, at the edge of wetlands in the south of the island, it became the capital when the Spanish settled. They gave it a distinct Spanish Colonial layout, with lots of internal courtyards and walled gardens and a Renaissance-influenced checkerboard of streets placed around a dramatic central plaza. Spanish interest in Jamaica waned when it became clear there was no gold, and it became a backwate...

"Jones' memoir reads like one long provocation, punctuated by boasts of sexual insatiability, entitled demands, and commanding declarations ("I am my own sugar daddy!"). Even the title of her book courts the contrary. What's not to like?"

Autorentext

Performer, actress, and musician Grace Jones has been making a name for herself since she left Jamaica as a twelve-year-old in the 1960s. First finding fame as a fashion model in the early 1970s, then as a sensational disco queen during the Studio 54 years, she is as much surrealist as showgirl, as much performance artist as party animal. She has been Bond villain and Warhol confidante, post-modern icon and avant-garde pop star. I’ll Never Write My Memoirs is her first book.

Klappentext

Iconic music and film legend Grace Jones gives an in-depth account of her stellar career, professional and personal life, and the signature look that catapulted her into the stardom stratosphere.

Grace Jones, a veritable “triple-threat” as acclaimed actress, singer, and model, has dominated the entertainment industry since her emergence as a model in New York City in 1968. Quickly discovered for her obvious talent and cutting-edge style, Grace signed her first record deal in 1977 and became one of the more unforgettable characters to emerge from the Studio 54 disco scene, releasing the all-time favorite hits, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” and “I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You).” And with her sexually charged, outrageous live shows in the New York City nightclub circuit, Grace soon earned the title of “Queen of the Gay Discos.”

But with the dawn of the ’80s came a massive anti-disco movement across the US, leading Grace to focus on experimental-based work and put her two-and-a-half-octave voice to good use. It was also around this time that she changed her look to suit the times with a detached, androgynous image. In this first-ever memoir, Grace gives an exclusive look into the transformation to her signature style and discusses how she expanded her musical triumph to success in the acting world, beginning in the 1984 fantasy-action film Conan the Destroyer alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the James Bond movie A View to a Kill, and later in Eddie Murphy’s Boomerang.

Featuring sixteen pages of stunning full-color photographs, Miss Grace Jones takes us on a journey from Grace’s religious upbringing in Jamaica to her heyday in Paris and New York in the ’70s and ’80s, all the way to present-day London, in what promises to be a no holds barred tell-all for the ages.

Leseprobe
I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
 

1.

Spanish Town

I was born.

It happened one day, when I least expected it, on an island measuring only 4,411 square miles, a teeming mountainous land of wood and water among a chain of islands in the center of the Caribbean Sea at the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean. That wondrous isle in the western seas.

I came out of my mother feetfirst. I arrived kicking and pissed off, sticky with fury, soaked to the skin. I was what’s known as a stargazing fetus as well, my neck fully extended. From the very beginning I was going against the grain and making trouble. Perhaps I was holding on to my mother for dear life, somehow knowing what was about to happen next. I didn’t want to leave the one place I had felt at home, where I had been floating for so long, and enter the darkness. Inside, there was light. Outside, instantly, the unknown. The cord was cut. Startled by a strange newness, I didn’t immediately make much of a noise, so I was slapped and slapped, to prove that I was normal. I cried out. I’ll show you noise. I’ll show you normal. I shrieked. In my own uprooted newborn way, I probably cursed.

Here I am.

Grace Beverly Jones. As was the custom, I would be known by my second name. Beverly. Bev. Later, when I was four or five, my skin was so charcoal black I would be engulfed when the warm, sultry night fel…