One Song - Grace Jones' "Slave To The Rhythm"

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Is there such a thing as a “perfect song?” Well if there’s someone who might be able to make it, leave it to one of the most culturally influential artists in music and fashion history! On this episode of One Song, Diallo and LUXXURY break down Grace Jones’ 1985 chart-topping, club-ready hit, “Slave To The Rhythm.” They dive into all the layers that make this song so pristine — including Grace’s smooth, powerful voice, the lush '80s synths, a really funky bass line, and D.C.-style go-go beats – and talk about the creative team that helped Grace attain international icon status as a boundary-breaking musician and model.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laxury, today's song is from one of the most culturally influential artists in music and fashion history. In fact, this song hit number one on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart in 1985, and we have to bring this up. There are literally dozens of versions of this song. That's absolutely right. And there are dozens of titles for this song. Crazy. If you look up the song on any service, you're likely to find other things that aren't the song.

We're going to talk about the canonical version in this episode. And we'll explain why that is that there's all these variations. But this is this artist's most commercially successful single, one on which she layers her smooth, powerful voice over lush 80s synths, a really funky baseline, and interestingly and unusually a Washington, D.C. style go-go beat. That's right. And this artist first made a name for herself as a model. And then on the downtown New York, Andy Warhol, Steve Rubel, Studio 54 disco scene, she has become an unforgettable international icon fusing genres and really, challenging gender and societal norms throughout her career on the mic, on the runway, and on the big screen. And by the end of this episode, we'll answer the question, is this a

perfect song? I'm going to state a pretty strong case. Spoiler alert, that it might just be a perfect song. Just giving you a heads up, so you're ready for it. Yeah, I'll see if I can make a case for Oregon. Oh, okay. Maybe your counterpoint is an imperfect song. I'll probably agree with you. I think perfect songs do exist. Friendship does matter. It's true. It's one song, and that song is Slade to the Rhythm by Grace Jones. I'm actor, writer, director, and sometimes DJ Diallo Riddell. And I'm producer, DJ, songwriter, and musicologist, luxury, aka the guy who sometimes whispers, interpolations.

And if you want to watch one song, please go to our YouTube channel and watch this full episode. And while you're there, please like and subscribe. All right, let's begin. Look, before we begin this episode, we just want to say that we're not going to have time to get super deep on everything, Grace Jones. You know, she was a model, she was an actor, she's a queer icon. We'll touch on those, but we're going to focus on her musicality, her vocals, her delivery, and much, much more. That's right. As an artist, she is like PhD level. You could teach a college course on Grace Jones. I'm sure I would not be surprised. I'm sure it's been done. I'm sure it's been done. But today we're going to focus on the music and specifically this one song that is one of my favorite all-time songs.

Now, luxury, as we prepared this episode, I learned you have a very strong opinion about Grace Jones and slave to the rhythm. How did you first discover this song and grace and why do you think it's a perfect song? When I was 13, I fell in love with a handful of bands and learned from reading the liner notes that they were all connected. So Frankie goes to Hollywood, art of noise, propaganda. And this particular song by Grace Jones, Slaved to the Rhythm, were all produced by Trevor Horn. And that person was the first producer I was aware of. It's the first time I was sort of aware that behind the scenes this music was being made just because I was like, this sounds so good. Why does it sound good? So it sent me on a journey, which I guess is currently where I'm at in the journey is like the rest of my life is like chasing.

making perfect sounding music. In fact, the name of this man's publishing company is perfect songs. My publishing company is called Expensive Sounding Music. I think they might be related. So I'm just a huge fan of Grace Jones, the artist of this song, but also, and we're going to talk a lot about it on this episode, the producer Trevor Horn. I love that.

And look, I'll be honest. This is not a Grace Jones song I know well. My fandom of Grace Jones comes from the nightclubbing album. I love nightclubbing. I love walking in the rain There are other songs in her Pull up to the bumper, right? My Jamaican guy, come on.

Yeah, your name of the songs that I love. These are songs that I hope that we can talk a little bit about over the course of the episode. But we do call it one song for a reason and this is a song that once we started preparing this episode I was like, oh, this is a very good song. Maybe eventually this will make my Grace Jones top five. Oh, okay.

Let's see if we can do it. All right, let's dive into Grace's history. Beverly Grace Jones was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica. But her family moved to Syracuse, New York when she was 12. By the age of 15, she was basically living on her own in New York. She's a go-go dancer. She's going by the name Mendoza, so her preacher dad doesn't find out what she's doing for a living. And she eventually gets signed with Willamina, the Willamina Modeling Agency.

But here's what's interesting. She already knew that she wanted to do some acting. And every play and film that she went out for basically was looking for like a more traditional black, probably southern American accent. And she just didn't have that. And so, you know, when she wasn't getting the work that she wanted either in front of the camera or as a model, she moved to Paris where her looks basically made her really stand out among the Parisian model scene. You're absolutely right. She moved away from Jamaica. She had a huge family.

And she essentially kind of rebelled. So she went away from her preacher, father. and this kind of strict upbringing and set father, I should say, and moved to New York and became an internationally known supermodel in the span of just a few years. Right, at a time when there were not many models that looked like her. That's right. She was also a black woman.

Yes. But an unusual and androgynously, you know, and thin one. Yeah. So she became really huge very quickly because that was a look that was exploding. In Europe, it was what they wanted, especially. So she was living abroad. She was living in France, going back and forth with New York, and becoming just like this downtown, as you mentioned, Andy Warhol, this is like that era that I think we both, one of many eras maybe we wish we had participated in because it seems so fun on the outside. It's Studio 54. It's the nightclubbing. It is the glamour. It's interview magazine. It's Andy Warhol. It's all of the above.

If I am Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, I think I'm going back to New York in the early age. I think we share that. I mean, look, she's got Keith Herring painting her for a Robert Maplethorpe photo. Her roommate is just a. Kallang. She's like... You got Keith Heron. You got Larry LeVon. She tells great stories about like being in the booth with Larry at Studio 54. There's an amazing picture I want to say of Larry, Grace, Keith, and Fela Kuti. Oh, man. What? In the DJ booth at the Paradise Garage. You're just like, can I just go there for an hour? Just for an hour. Yeah. No, my God. She does this. She has this great autobiography called I will never write my memoirs, actually.

Wow. And she goes into great detail. I mean, I sent a couple of quotes over before the episode. of like what I won't be saying on the show. But one of them talking about like doing drugs, using specific body orifices. Like it's crazy the life this lady lived. And she's still with us today. She's one of, she's an icon of living her life as she puts it in one of her songs.

And really throwing stuff in your face. Yeah. You know, like she's not one. Challenging. Yeah, she absolutely wants to challenge you. Right. And speaking of challenging your audience, I think it has to be said.

Grace Jones, absolutely known for a distinctive, androgynous appearance and uniquely avant-garde style. when we were talking about this, we were like, is she the black female David Bowie? That's not to be reductionist because she's more than almost anybody we've ever talked about on the show. She is 100% her own creation.

But obviously, like, Bowie made it okay to be androgynous in some ways. It's the androgyny. It's also the mixture of visual representation, but also music, like understanding. It's an art project. She feels like, like, Bowie feels like I'm in our project. And I think Grace Jones might think of herself as an art project in some ways, too. Her music is one component of the entirety of what her presentation to the world is, what she's delivering to the world.

I like that. And what I also point out is that because she's somebody who's like blowing up in the late 70s, she absolutely, if Bowie sort of clears the path for it to be cool to be an androgynous pop star, Grace clears the path for artists in the 80s. And I'm thinking specifically of Boy George and some of the, some of the androgynous New Wave, English 80s band. Annie Lennox. Annie Lennox. All of this.

Androsy have a lot of the same collaborators. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And it is a lineage maybe that does have a Bowie connection in all of this. I mean, like, Grace is hanging out at clubs with Bowie and Emon. And so like there's just this really cool, way too cool for me. And I wish I was, everything we're talking about. These are all of our heroes. And they're like cross-pollining.

That's why this is such an important moment and place. Because in Manhattan, they're all crammed together in this little downtown area. Yeah. They're going to the same clubs. and they're cross-pollinating all these different art styles. Grace is at the center of it all. Listen, while we're at it, we do have to bring up sort of an unsung, problematic unsung member of this entourage,

the Grace Jones story, is a gentleman called Jean-Paul Goud, who is a French photographer who they meet in 1977, right when she started her music career. And for the next seven years, they collaborate on pretty much everything visual. So album covers, videos, even the choreography for her stage show. And it should be said... That's really important thing. break up because I do think that like grace Jones when we think about grace Jones you can't you can't

forget about the distinct visuals it's that come along with grace Jones and um and they not just they don't just define grace in this period they didn't find the visual landscape of the 70s and the 80s like that that that goes but tell us more about uh because they were they were they were lovers she's hypersexualized there's exoticism in the mix it should be said that later on in 2014 he did the famous Kim Kardashian break the internet. Right. A photo shoot for paper magazine. Which is based on Island Life cover.

Right, which itself is based on apparently an older image of a large, bootied woman from the 1800s. Well, I mean, let's talk about it. Fetitization. Of the black female body for that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that there are people who would take him to task for that.

But I also think that, you know, Grace did have agency here and wanted to throw that in people's faces. It does feel very collaborative. and it does at the same time, looking at it now with 2024 eyes, it's like, well, I think they were working together equally. I'd like to hope that there wasn't a power dynamic in play here. I mean, she was the famous artist and he was, I guess, a famous photographer. It's really tricky when you look at it to sort of, we're never going to know. It's elusive, the absolute truth of who is holding the cards in this relationship. But I think on the whole, the work is beautiful and

speaks for itself. The album covers, which, by the way, side note, there seems to be a right. issue these iconic album covers including for this single and this album are not currently available on the streaming services there's a rights issue apparently is that through the photographer i don't know it's unclear who's withholding the rights probably the photographer but it i mean i always thought the most interesting thing about that photograph was that uh it's not that she was actually able to strike that position yeah a series of pictures right elongated right elongated so that it looks like she's striking a position that's probably impossible for for, you know, everybody except for me after a hard night of drinking.

Right. Exactly. What Diyall is referring to. Those pictures have been suppressed. What D'all is referring to, the other famous image of Island Life, where she's, like, doing this impossible, like, pose with standing on one foot. You've seen this one? Yeah.

And that's more digitally, that's more manipulated to look longer than it really is. That's not actually her body. Can I say my favorite good photo of her? It's the one where she's wearing the Armani suit and has the flat top hair and she's got the cigarette in her hand. That was just really 80s cool. They're beautiful images and really iconic stuff. So I think on the whole like, I think it is what it is. Maybe that's as far as we can get with it.

We can identify that this is a beautiful collaboration that led to incredible artwork. An incredible influence. An incredible influence. I mean, we're talking about there's a sheer international nature to Grace's fame that I think that. Look, a lot of artists are famous all around the world. They have international fame. But some people just seem to travel within that international famous person bubble. You know what I mean?

Like she seemed to really relish being in the international scene with like famous French photographers, Swedish bodybuilders, downtown New York culture. Right. Dolf Lundgren, is he Swedish? He's Swedish. I did not know this. You thought he was Russian. He seemed because of his. But his name is Dolf Lungren.

Rocky four? Is it Rocky four? It's Rocky four. Can we just say for a second? Dove Lundgren has one of the best 1985s of anybody on record because he comes into that year, not really having done anything except for being an amazing student who's on his way to MIT. Like he's a brilliant dude. Yeah.

Yeah. And he's working, I want to say, in like Sydney's club district, Sydney, Australia's club district where he's a bouncer. And Grace Jones comes in one night and she asked him to become like part of her security detail. they eventually begin dating. She's shooting a view to a kill, the James Bond movie, and the director, one of the extras didn't show up. The director was like, hey, what about that guy with Grace? He could just put him in one of the Soviet outfits.

So he's an unaccredited extra in a view to a kill. Get that guy. Hey, he's got a good look. You should be a movie star. And then a couple of months later, he becomes Sylvester Stallone's co-lead and Rocky. What a great villain he is. To go from unaccredited

extra in a James Bond movie to co-starring with one of the biggest stars of the 1980s in a completely unforgettable role. And by the way, him and Grace continue dating for the rest of the 80s. Another thing I love about Grace's music career is that a lot of her songs were covers

and I didn't know that when I fell in love with them. I did not really. Obviously, Leveon Rose is a cover of Piaf. But Warm Leatherette. Here's a little bit of the original Warm Leatherette. Warm See the breaking glass Walking in the rain

Here's a snippet Of the original Walking in the rain I mean By the way Walking in the rain To this day It's like I saw

That plays On repeat in my head All the time I love her love is the drug version I love her private life version The Pretender song Yes Don't forget about night clubbing

The original nightclubby Iggy and Bowie Yep Demolition Man which is a sting song for her. First I learned, actually, I didn't realize the police. Only did it after her version. And she even does Joy Division songs.

She does She's Lost Control. Which is perfect for Grace Jones when you think about it. It's so perfect. Grace's music career has like several chapters. And the first one, as you alluded to, La Vian Rose, she has this three album, this trilogy of disco records, which she does with Tom Moulton, someone that will be talking about in future episodes.

Yeah. You know, we're going to be talking about him a lot on future episodes. But basically, he invented the 12-inch dance remix as we know it. extended version, literally the 12-inch instead of 7-inch is because of this man, Tom Moulton. Well, he works with her for three records. They're okay. They're not great. They're not her best work, but we don't dislike them.

But they do have in common the Richard Bernstein interview magazine style covers, and they do bring her to a certain amount of prominence. I think it's important to point out when she's doing these disco albums. It's not that she's producing like these huge, huge hits. Granted, I love her performance of I Need a Man, which if you see performance of it on YouTube, it's kind of like a disco performance, but it's also very much theme. Very dramatic, very over the top. And there was an article in Pitchfork written by Barry Walters that I think got it exactly

right. He said, she was as queer as a relatively straight person could get. Her image celebrated blackness and subverted gender norms. She presented something we had never seen before in pop performance, a woman who was light, sexy, and hyperfeminine while also exuding a ribbled, butch swagger. And he also quotes a 1979 evidently article where he also just, I think that they got it absolutely right as well. They said, Grace Jones was a question mark followed by an exclamation point. It's all part of this studio 54 world she's living in.

Then she has this next chapter, which we were just talking about with all the new wave covers. And this is happening, by the way, it should be noted at Compass Point Studios in Bahamas, which is Chris Blackwell from Ireland. That's where he has the Compass Point All-Stars who are these studio musicians, it's Sly and Robbie. It's a whole bunch of like the top-notch Jamaican reggae stars of the day. And that's who backs her up on this series of records, the Worm Leather at the Nightclub and The Living My Life. And we've mentioned it before, but it should be said that my favorite song from this period.

Well, it pulled up to the bumper and my Jamaican guy are neck and neck. But let's give my Jamaican guy its flowers and play a little snippet. She later revealed that her Jamaican guy she's singing about was Tyrone Downey of the Whalers, of Barmorely's Whalers, because he was married at the time, so she couldn't tell him. But she wrote the song about it. And hip-hop fans, yes, you're right. That is the song that they sampled for this L.L. Cool J. Classic. Oh, by the way, one other great sample before we move on from this period in Grace Jones

is the pull-up to the bumper sample, which a lot of us didn't know about, but it was used, I think, expertly by Q-tip and a tribe called Quest on this song. The arts are moving butts. The rhythm's happening. And it's moving up. The chopper's been on home. for much too long. Full credit, we were starting at the Compass Point All-Stars.

That's one of my favorite guys is the keyboard player. His name is Wally Bauderoo. And he's the one who finds those sounds and finds those really warm, like simple, often chords that are just so hooky and memorable.

So that's him on that track. All right, so I mentioned earlier on this episode, Trevor Horn was going to come up. Well, this is where Trevor Horn comes up. And we like Trevor Horn. We love Trevor Horn. We love Trevor Horn. It's definitely not the last time I hear

the name Trevor Horn mentioned on one song because we will definitely be doing future episodes about owner of a lonely heart. Yes. We'll be doing Frankie goes to Hollywood, relax. We'll be doing ABC's The Look of Love, if I've got anything to do with it. So fun. Some of my favorite songs and some of the most pristine and perfect pop of all time, in my opinion.

So he is the sound. He is the studio. He is the group of people that he works with, the collaborators. And he's kind of creating the sound of the 80s. It's often said he's one of the main definers of this pristine, clean, synth-driven pop of the moment. And part of that is because he's using both the ferulite and the sinclaviour. And it should be said, he pronounces it, synclavier. Which is like the fourth pronunciation, I think we've heard.

I know. I can't remember the different pronunciations on the show, but different people say it differently. I think Martin Gore says synclavia. But in interviews with both Trevor Horn and Steve Lipson, who will be talking about, who worked on this song, they both say synclavier. So you know what? It's just a word. There's multiple ways of saying a word. We always talk about unsung heroes here. And I do feel like Trevor Horn and Lipson are definitely unsung heroes. They're definitely unsung heroes. And so Trevor Horn and his team are making use of both of these early expensive samplers that we've mentioned on other episodes of the show.

Both the Fairlight and the Sinclaviour or the Sinclaviour make appearances throughout his work. On this song, it's the Sinclivir. We'll talk about that more in a second. But first, I do want to say that because he had these tools, what he started to do, which was really interesting in this moment, is I think we've mentioned on the Sister Nancy episode, among others, you know, Lee Scratch Perry is another one of my producer heroes, maybe our collective heroes. And one thing that Jamaica pioneered and Lee Scratch Perry pioneered was reusing audio material, stuff that had been recorded. So it would be like a rhythm track, like the instrumental of a song, and then you'd have another song that you could make on top of that. Or you'd have a toast, you know, DJ, toasting on top of it,

and multiple uses of what was already paid for and recorded, basically, could be released. Interestingly, with Trevor Horn in this era, he's starting to kind of do a reverse of that, where he's recorded all this material, and he's like, you know what, I can reuse that snare that I recorded for Yes's album. I can reuse that for the art of noise, or I can reuse this drum fill, et cetera, et cetera, because I have these samplers. We've sampled. He's sort of making his own little splice library, his own little sample library,

before that was a thing because nobody else had these expensive toys and tools. So I think that's really interesting and in particular on this record it's done to the nth degree because there's only one real song on the slave to the rhythm record.

It's slave to the rhythm and seven songs that make use of the material or the ideas like we recorded melodies from that idea, but it's really one song eight times. So it's very clever use of recordings. I mean, now we live in a day and age where everybody wants to make as much money as they possibly can.

But, like, props to that record label for giving us so many different titles. Yeah. And then the actual title of the song, by the way, if you're looking for this song, like, you know, on most places. It's not called slave to the rhythm. It's not called Slate to the Rhythm. It's called Ladies and Gentlemen, Miss Grace Jones. It's confusing on purpose.

I mentioned, yeah, so they're reusing material from their own recordings. And that also takes the form of putting out multiple versions of any given song. Like remix upon remix with sometimes they have slight variations. They almost always have different titles. So if like me you were a fan of the band at the era, you would be buying multiple copies of kind of the same thing, like over and over again. Like Frankie Coast of Hollywood fans can unite in the knowledge that we all have the same

five 12-inch versions of two tribes with the subtlest variation. Actually, I should say, some of them are really different. Some of them are 10 minutes long and some are three minutes. But the genius of repackaging them within the label confines, like they weren't outsourcing it to jelly bean Benitas or some of the hot remixer and doing one-offs. They were like, hey, man, this is a strategy right here, a marketing and financial strategy to reuse to just, because they own the multi-tracks.

The producer is the label, is everything. So they have total control over everything in a way. that say like Amit Erdogan didn't necessarily have control over over there at Atlantic. Let's talk for a second about Trevor Horn's record label, because he does have his own label for which he has complete control over not just the music, but also how it's put out. And that's on purpose. And he also owns the publishing and the publishing company. He founds the record label ZTT, which stands for Zhang Tum, tomb, with a journalist of all things, a journalist for the enemy called Paul Morley, who is another one of the unsung heroes of this story

because it's him on the record in these little interspersed, not the song versions of the song, there's a couple of men speaking, and he's one of them. He's interviewing Grace Jones. He's one of the interviewers. I'll talk more about Morley in a second, but just to finish the thought about Zhang Toom Toom,

this record label signs Frankie goes to Hollywood. It's the first signing. They go on to put out Art of Noise, and then they go on to put out one of Diallo and my shared favorite sort of lesser-known bands of the era, which is this band propaganda. Yeah. And you can kind of hear the through line.

If you can picture this song, Enslaved to the Rhythm, it's this pristine production. Yeah. Every sound has its place and it's very clean and evocative, I would say. It's a very European. It's very European. Tutonician, very German to me. You know, Grace Jones, we mentioned Annie Lennox. In the later part of the decade, you've got Swingout Sister.

Yeah. You know, these are artists that I feel like they were singing on the runway of Milan at the show, long before those places opened up to like R&B at hip hop stars. You know what I mean? That's true. This to me is the sound of like driving and asking. It's Europop. It's mid-80s Europop.

And that song has one of my favorite bands again of that era. The singer is named Claudia Brookin. And she ended up married. Well, she married Paul Morley, who I just alluded to. And Paul Morley, the journalist from N.M. brings to it the concepts. He's not a musician himself. But what he is is very marketing savvy and concept-driven.

And he's also, it should be said, a little on the pretentious side. He would write these reviews and he would take down a lot of artists in such a way that it was like very obtusely and academically and sometimes nothing to do with music in the writing. And he's sort of famously one of these enemy journalists of the era that all the bands despise. Even The Cure have a song called Grinding Hot, which they retitled, Desperate Journalist in ongoing meaningful review situation for their appeal session. And that's what they retitled it, just out of anger towards Paul Morley. But he's kind of a genius. He's credited with those Frankie goes to Hollywood. Frankie say war, hide yourself, relax, don't do it.

Shirts that were a huge phenomenon in the 80s. I saw them in those music videos. And I love those songs. I owned all the shirts. I owned all the guys. You mean you were into shirts even then? Such a fan boy for ZTT. And one more thing that Paul brought to Zang Toom Toom was I talked about all these versions and the remixes and the versioning.

It was him that would be naming all of it. these things, not the title that you would expect. So when you look at the album cover for Slave to the Rhythm, it's not side one, side two, it's dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, in certain pieces, is side one. And dot, dot, dot, dot, in further certain pieces. That's so Paul Morley. That is so Paul Morley. And then he could have gone ahead and titled all these like versions of Slave to the Rhythm, like Slave to the Rhythm, New York remix or whatever it would have been. But no, they've all, there's Jones the Rhythm, there's the fashion show, there's ladies and gentlemen. gentlemen. So that's, I think Paul Morley inaction being clever trousers. After the break, we'll dive

into how slave to the rhythm was made. And why is it named that? Don't go anywhere. All right, welcome back to one song, luxury. We're talking about slave to the rhythm. Tell us, how did this song and album get made? So this song has an interesting backstory. It was originally intended for Frankie Goes to Hollywood to be their follow-up to relax. Yeah. And as such, it was written by two people, Bruce Willie and Simon Darlo. Bruce Woolley was Trevor Horan's bandmate. I didn't get to mention because I said so much about him. I missed maybe the most important

thing, which is that he was in the Buggles. Of course. A classic song. And Bruce Woolley was also in that band with him. And he writes the original version with Simon Darlo of this song of Slave to the Rhythm. In fact, it used to be

called Slave to the Rhythm of the Chain Gang. And they do They double down on race. What's funny is as British guys, they may not even know. That's fair point. Fair point. But let's continue. And in fact, Frankie Goes to Hollywood recorded a version.

So let's hear what Frankie recorded, which did not make the cut. This is a demo. This is Frankie's demo version of the original version. Of Slaved to the rhythm. And you'll notice it's very different. I am not mad at that. You like that track? I do.

I kind of like it. It's not terrible. It's obviously much different than what we're used to. It's 140 BPM instead of 97. I started doing my 80s dance to it. It's super fast. It's definitely very 80s. It's very like 80s fast.

And it's a little more punky, I guess you'd say, a little crunchier. It's a little more you can do this to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Watch on YouTube. You'll see what I just did. Could have been a hit? I don't know. Maybe they were thinking as a follow-out to relax, which was massive.

Maybe it wasn't what they were looking for. Maybe it was more of an album track. Whatever happened at some point, we know, where we've heard this, story at least from Stephen Lipson himself, who I'll be mentioning more about in a second. He was an engineer but also a musician on this track and a co-writer along with Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley and Simon Darlo, the four of them got songwriting credits because they entered the picture after Chris Blackwell from Island Records. Here's the song, isn't crazy about it, but he likes the title. And he's like, can you guys do something with this title for my other artist, Grace Jones?

And that's what he brings, in addition to the demo, to Trevor Horn and Stephen Lipson. The one other thing, and there's a little conflict about this, the who had the go-go idea. We'll talk about go-go in a second. But either Chris Blackwell had the idea and make it a go-go song for Grace Jones or possibly Trevor Horan had that idea. So freaking cool. I mean, like, listen, I grew up in Atlanta, but you can't live, you know, 10 hours south of Washington, D.C. Without having some go-go filter down to, you know, the parties that's going to. Well, let's talk about what's going to.

To the uninitiated, go-go is an extremely. regional yet popular sound if you will a genre of music in the DMV what we call the DMV the DC Maryland and Virginia area That's right And if you go to this day

You'll hear like kids with buckets on the street Are playing this rhythm Well I think that's where that's sort of where it came from It was guys beaten on buckets But if you don't think you've heard Gogo I'm going to just play a quick snippet This is one of these seminal artists Of the Gogo sound

This is Chuck Brown And this is a song called Bustin' Loose Now, if you hear that song, you'll obviously hear the funk influences, and a lot of this music was coming out in the early 80s. That's Chuck Brown and Soul Searchers Bustin' Loose from 1978. And by the way, if you think you might have recognized Bustin' Loose, it might be because of this. Chuck Brown is given a songwriting credit for Nellie's Hot in here.

And one of the distinguishing characteristics of just musically speaking is that beat. And that beat has a swing to it. Boom. Dunga Dundit. It's got a triplet feel to it. like we sort of talked about in other episodes, like the shuffle. This is in, I would say this is in that zone of like three on four in terms of like part of what gives it its very unique and distinctive feel.

Well, I was, that swing feel. I was going to say, I played that song and obviously you can hear like the funk and sort of like the, you can hear its influences. But to me, when I play another song by a group called EU, you'll hear what I think is like truly the go-go sound, like the very distinctive. stripped down sound of go-go. Here's the song you've probably heard before. It's at your auntie's cookout.

It's called Da But. I mean, you can hear it. Just rock it to the Go-Go beat. But it was also incorporated into the hip-hop of the DC area. This is a bit of DJ Cool's 20-minute workout. Special dedication going out to all of y'all. And I swear, I hope you're having a ball, baby. I'm in a pretty.

Like that sort of like that bouncy rhythm that sounds like it could be played on a bucket. That syncopated kick drum, boom, boom, boom, boom. And typically, typically, a prominent horn section. Yeah. You know, you don't always hear. And a lot of percussion. You don't always hear a lot of guitars on Go Go tracks.

It's usually that percussion that we're talking about. And there's almost always those horns. And you're not getting a lot of song structure, I would say. A lot of this music came out of a live. performance. So you'd have hours long jamming on a groove. It's like called a 20 minute workout, right? Feel a style, feel a cutie or James Brown for that matter. Yes. And I was also going to say early hip hop with the chatting and the original version of the Sugar Hill gang. Like, you know, they were trying to make on a 15 minute track. Yeah. What a guy would do in a party. And it's the same

with everybody from Chuck Brown to DJ Cool. The song is called 20 minute workout. The song, the version I just played is roughly five and a half minutes. But you've been to believe that somewhere there's a piece of vinyl with an actual 20-minute version. I'm sure. You just put on and, you know, DJ Cool's going to talk like this. I guess this rap said, hold up. You know, like, he's just trying to keep that party going. Yeah.

And I think what a great move on the behalf of these collaborators to think, you know what, we're going to take that distinct go-go sound and not appropriate it, but like, you know, in the, let's put it in the best terms, to bring it to the forefront and give us some shon. to an international market that may not even know about the go-go because i'm saying go-go unless you knew somebody from go-go it was not prominent it was not something that everybody just it's a surprisingly underutilized beat as you go through the sort of canon of popular music of the last couple of i mean 50 or 60 years since it first came on the scene yeah thanks to chuck brown you really don't hear go-go beats a lot no in pop music we didn't have the internet guys like you know the regional

music was regional music. When you would go to Chicago, you would hear house. But if you went to a party in Atlanta, the same weekend, you would probably not hear that much house, you know. And definitely if you were at a party in D.C., you may not even hear what we would call like East Coast hip-hop. It might be a lot of go-go and southern, you know, whatever they were calling Southern hip-hop at the time. So one way or the other, Trevor Horn, by the way, says that it was his idea because he was thinking, what rhythm, I'm sorry in advance, what rhythm would I be a slave to? And in his mind, it would be Go-Go, because that was the hip new beat. But in a different telling of the story, it was Chris Blackwell's idea.

So one way or the other idea came to reinterpret this song with a different beat. Right. Well, while we're talking about the beat, let's get into some stems. Okay. Do you want to start with the drums? Let's start with the drums. So let me just introduce one more person named Steve Lipson. We've alluded to him already.

The fourth co-writer of this song. He tells the story. I saw a great interview on the producing like a pro channel. Shout out to that show, where he talks about the origin. of this song. It starts with Chris Blockwell booking a band, which consisted of handpicked five of the best go-go musicians from DC. He wanted to get the real deal. So he booked some time at the power station in New York. Steve Lipson and Trevor Horn fly out. They're introduced to the band, and the band starts jamming. And right away, they're like, they're not sure what to do with it,

because it sounds great. They're warming up and they play a beat. It's William Juju House is the drummer, and there's two percussion players. The little beats is one guy's name. And then Shorty Tim. There's also a bass player, a guitar player, keyboard player, but they're all jamming. They just sort of, to warm up, they're playing a groove. And it's a 97 BPM groove, and it sounds a little like this.

That's just the drums, and here's the percussion. So they're jamming out to this. And it sounds great, but kind of to what we were talking about a second ago, with Go-Go being an extended long-form jam, which isn't necessarily harmonically rich or driven by chord changes. It was difficult, according to the telling, the Steve Lipson telling, for this group of musicians to wrap their head around the demo now transforming itself into this new song.

In other words, they weren't really hitting the chord changes, or maybe it wasn't sounding right. Something basically wasn't jelling. So Lipson and Horn who have been flown out, they're looking at the clock, they're like, we don't know, they weren't sure what to make of what was being recorded until clock struck five, the union rolls, the band had to quit. So they go back to the hotel. It's Steve Lipson, Trevor Horn, and actually Bruce Woolley, are there to try to make this song happen

and this hit happen for Chris Blackwell and for Grace Jones. And they go back and they've got some gear with them. They actually brought with them, they have an 808, they brought a bass guitar, they brought a synth. And they listen back and they find this one two-bar loop, which I will now play for you. And you can hear, it's kind of interesting in the background, you can hear them just having a great time, the musicians, you can hear like shouting. And in this song, all you're hearing from beginning to end is this two bar loop. Here comes the shout.

It's kind of hard to hear, but you can hear that every two bars. And that goes to the entire song because all they did was they didn't know they were recording. They just put up a handful of like the mics were on. They were hitting record just because it's like a habit in the recording studio. But they weren't like fully set up to get the maximum. out of this band. I love it when you can hear unintended voices in the studio.

That's always fun for me. It demonstrates the humanity. Especially underneath this track, which is so perfect and precise with other elements coming in and out. I almost forgot a really funny anecdote that Lipson tells about that two bars that they chose,

the reason why they were able to use it, evidently, because they were all jamming in the studio together and there was some bleed. There was a moment where the guitar player who had been jamming had to use the restroom So he went to the bathroom So he's not playing And apparently that enabled them

To find more of a clean drum loop to use Oh wow So that's part of why you're hearing That particular drum loop Now I don't know if the shouting is because the guy's like Hey, you're back from the bathroom That could be That's speculation

We speculated on the show So that two bar loop is going through the entire song Whenever you hear a crash It's because they overdub the crash And then there's a handful of really special spicy fills Which came later in the jam They listened through this entire

They spent just one day recording, and they spent apparently almost a week, I believe, going through the drum track and just finding things to take out and splice and piece together to their new arrangement. So there's this really spicy drum fill here. Yeah, there's a couple of them. Spicy fill. Spicy fill.com is one of them. I love that one so much. I'll play it for you in context. That's during the bridge.

Oh, and then it ends with another one of them. Let me play that for you. I'll play the whole thing afterwards in the mix. You can kind of hear. drummer in that too. That's how they stopped. They were like, okay, I guess we're done jamming now. But that was all just part of that. We start recording.

You're like, no, we record it. That was it. We don't need you guys anymore. So I'm going to play that. That was in the bridge. I'll play you a little bit of context. It's this really cool weird bridge chord. Oh, man. I love this song so much.

It's getting to that point in the show where we're playing the stems and I'm like getting all hyped. And you're like, I got to throw in another instrument. Tell us what's going on with the bass in this song. So Lipson contributes this original demo bass line, which was then expertly replayed in his telling by Louis Jardine, who was pretty faithful to what Lipson came up with. Pretty straightforward in the verse, just two chords.

I like that little film. Let me play that again. Little pop. Almost Seinfeldian. It's almost Seinfeldian. Or Chuck Rainey hiding in his chair in a steely dance session, Ian, because he's popping. And let's listen to another couple moments. Here's Louis a little later on.

Oh, you know what that is? That's this like one bar of three. So they talk about, it's interesting, like thinking about the Trevor Horn brain, arrangement can mean a couple of things. It's both the linear beginning to end of a song, like what happens when, but it's also like the layers of what instruments are coming and going. So in the arrangement, they're thinking, how can we kind of add just a little interest now and then?

And kind of like on Hart's barracuda, he decides, let's just throw in one bar of three. So I'll play it for you in the drums and the bass and then in the mix. and you'll hear, they just drop one beat around two minutes into the song. Two, three, one, three. And here it is in the mix. When I say the mix, these stems are far drier than usual. In other words, later on, the reverb is out of the compression. These are, it's not going to sound like the full song,

but you'll hear what a real dry, untreated mix sounds like, or mostly untreated. So as a listener, it's just a moment that you're like, oh, that was unusual. It sort of stops you short, just adding a little interest across the track, across the arrangement. And one more little fun fact. Besides playing the bass, Mr. Jardim also played the all-important triangle at the top of the song. In the perfect song, what are the guitars up to? There's three guitars in this track, and they're performed by J.J. Bell, who's a British session player, who went on to do a lot of stuff with Pet Shop Boys, actually.

Steve Lipson, again, engineer, co-writer of the song, and Bruce Wully, other co-writer of the song. Now, I'm not sure who plays which part. There is a story where Steve Lipson is explaining that he did the, quote, spranging away. But when I listened back, I wasn't sure which one was the spranging. I think the spranging might be,

here I'll just play it for you. And we can decide which is spranging and which isn't spranging. So is this spranging? Just one chord that's mirroring the vocal. Or is this springing? I think the first one is sprangin. I think I agree with you. I think the first one is sprang in.

Anytime you say sprangin, it does make me thinking, you send me sprang and, oh, you send me sprang and, which is just me singing mint conditions, you send me swinging, which sounds like this. I almost want to hear the original. I think I'm happier just knowing that version. There's a little clip. From Grace Jones to Mint Condition, we've done it.

We've done it. There's a real through line there because as I was listening, that's like that's a real slow down new jack swing. But there is swing in that. There's a, there's triplet swing which maps it to the go-go. Hold on. Might just be dros, but maybe because we're talking about go-go, it feels go-go.

It's swing. It has a swing to it. It's new jack swing. It's next to go-go. swing, where's Men Condition from? Which connects to jazz, which gets us back to New Orleans. Yes. In the 1890s, but it's not wrong.

Men Condition, it turns out, is from St. Paul, Minnesota. St. Paul, Minnesota. Let's continue. Here's the two guitars together. And then I'll add back in some instruments for the mix. By the way, listen to that percussion just then made me want to give, give it its own isolated listen. Because that's pretty pleasurable as well. Remember, that's our good friends, The Little Beats? It was Little Beets, it was Shorty.

Shorty Tim. But wasn't there a third? Who's the drum leader? Well, the drummer is William Juju House, but I'm saying just... We heard him and his two bars. And now here, let's give a little love to the Little Beats and Shorty. And I think if you're a go-go percussionist, that's your life for an hour and a half or three hours on stage every night.

No, but you know what else is cool about that? It's that it almost sounds like... It's from D.C., but it reminds you of steel drums from the Caribbean, which would have made sense to the ear of Grace Jones. Fair point. And then just one more little guitar part. There's one section in the second chorus where a third guitar comes in, and that's really satisfying.

On the build, with the arrangement I was mentioning before, you want to build. You want to add and subtract things across the song to build interest in the ear of the listener. Here's the new part, and then I'll add the rest back. Where's the one? One, two, three, four. And there's a clap there too. That was three guitars, bass, drums.

That's no synths? And percussion, no sense yet. That was already left without synth, right? All right. That was synth free. My friend. I want to hear some synth. Let's hear some synth.

The iconic intro synth. Now, a little backstory on this before I play it. Oh, you're teasing me. No, go ahead. There's multiple stories that I have seen and read. I am fairly sure that what we're about to hear in the intro is by a gentleman called Andy Richards, who is another part of the Trevor Horn and ZTT team, core team. He famously worked as the core team who did relax.

and came up with all the funny sounds on relax, like the orgasm sound, like the hits and such. So if you listen back to that song. He was just a guy with access to a sampler. He was, well, it's funny. I was listening to an interview with him.

He had done a lot of commercial work. And so a lot of the sounds that he had used for like film and TV commercials, he brought those back in. He brought them into the mix. And Trevor Horn was like, we need something here. And he's like, I think I got it. And he makes this sounds. Yeah, that makes sense.

He's almost like a Foley artist. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. In that era, we've mentioned on a few episodes, like the thriller one, like, since they are still new and people are like learning about their capabilities in real time. They're like, what can we do with this? Let's try that. So Andy Richards, I believe, from hearing an interview directly with him, and again, there is, there are other sources that say it came from a different synth than a different person. But I think this classic iconic intro is him playing the PPG, and I will now play that for you, the PPG synth.

I forgot the intro is the chorus. comes in later. Yeah. Yeah, I totally forgot about that. That's good construction. It's like anytime I can end a script with the same line that started the script, I feel like something good happened there. I think that's almost basic creation 101.

Yeah, so that becomes kind of a signature sound for him. Go ahead and the song. As a newcomer to this song, you know, because I might have heard it in my past, but really it is in 2024 that I have discovered this song through this podcast. Yes. That's the part of the song that stands out to me. It is so special, yes.

And from the deconstruction I did before the show, I believe what he's doing there is he's either layering two presets and two takes. It's unclear. But that is essentially a chord, a triad where one of the sounds has, stay with me, one of the sounds has a fifth in it. So every note has two notes in it that are interestingly related as fits. But it's six notes. And that's why there's a complexity, sort of a jazz colorfulness to those sounds.

And it's almost like they shouldn't work what they do. I'm like, you're like, jazz colorfulness. You did jazz hands. I have to. Jazz. Just makes me perform. Oh, gosh. Hello.

I'm a different guy. When there's a jazz chord, I just have to like inhabit a different persona. So what that means is, and by the way, another sound, if you want to try to envision it, is the classic show me love baseline. Yeah. Those are fifths. That baseline. is playing the root, but also it's actually maybe a 17th because it's

an octave and then the fifth above that. But the point is, it's kind of like power chords on guitar. Like when you're hearing ACDC or whoever, they're playing fifths all the time. Like that's like your classic crunchy rock thing. So I've gone down a rabbit hole, which may or may not be useful. No, there's, there's, like, still listening.

We didn't lose everybody. No, I'm kidding. No, this is what I, listen, we know for the Shaka Khan episode, This is why people come. So let's go deep. Let's go deep. So that's what's going on there.

Somehow, in my mind, I believe the Andy Richards layering on his PPG is the origin of that. Three-note chord with the six-note output. I want to hear more sense because I will say from the weekend episode to Tears for Fears to Warren G. I am never disappointed when we get to the synth stem. It's always one of my favorites. Like, maybe I'm like the reincarnated soul of like a keyboard player or something. But it always, maybe it's the fullness and the continuousness of it. I was a drummer.

Yeah. It's weird to me that I was like a drummer, but the part that always connects with my soul is the synth. Let's hear him. It's always a part of the song that I remember. When I listen to Slave to the rhythm, I remember the synth. Now, I remember when I was telling the story about how the song is transitioning from 140 BPM, Frankie Goes to Hollywood demo to the version we all know and love to this day. Would you just how many BPMs?

Let me guess. So we've already reduced it from 140. To 100. Close. 97. I'll give it to you. Okay. 97 is 100, but three less.

That was in the margin of error. Oh, absolutely. Like, if we were DJing, we could make that work. So we've already reduced to 97. We've obviously changed the instrumentation along the way. We have a real drummer instead of a drum machine, et cetera, et cetera. And now we also need court changes. We have a different arrangement happening with like, there's a verse, there's a chorus.

That comes into play, according to the. telling from Stephen Lipson when Bruce Woolley comes up with the chords. So he's responsible for figuring out like what the chord changes should be throughout the song. And in the verse, in the first verse, it's just guitar. There isn't any synth yet. So we first hear that, we have a little tease of the chorus in the intro. Then we hear it in the chorus and it's layered with this other keyboard, just doubling it. Yeah, let's hear that. And then I'll build it up. And we got guitar. And there's a little delay.

Wouldn't you agree? Yeah. You're right. It bends up like that. You're right. Yeah. Yeah, that's just a little portamento going on. I love that.

It's not the first time we've heard the word portamento on this show. So if the sense start off that way and they end that way, are they doing anything different in the middle? Yeah, there's that. These are my notes. Weird bridge. Weird bridge. I like that. Let's hear that.

Right? That goes some more spooky. That second chord. Like, okay, you're grabbing me with this. I'm happy. I'm on an island. Now, is that going minor? You're going to tell me no. Is it going minor? Is that second chord?

Yeah. That is a minor chord. Yes. Finally. 60 episodes in. It's from a major chord to a minor chord. And yeah, it's really spooky and eerie. That gives us a nice bridge.

We talked about in other episodes, The bridge is often a place in the song where you can kind of wipe the slate clean and go a completely different direction for eight or 16 bars before you bring it back for that big closing chorus, which in this case is massive because we're helped out by a orchestral arrangement including strings and brass to just drive at home. Let's hear some strings and some horns. Drive at home with some strings and some horns arranged by Richard Niles. Oh, wow. So earlier in the song, we have little

stabs here and there, very minimal punctuation marks like this. literally and then and I'll play for you where that happens it's fun that's in the second verse when Grace does this the little gaps in between where she's singing Man machine power life

and very much echoing how she goes low and so we have that low her voice I can't believe we've gotten this far into the episode without talking about Grace Jones's voice is that a contralto? I believe she's a contralto I mean, that... That is her range. But she also goes high.

She goes... That's the thing. She can go high. She can go high. And she also does the monotone. She does the Nico kind of talking thing, too. Again. Multiple characters.

Just cool people. Nico was a model, wasn't she? Yeah. I'm telling you, Grace, Grace's low voice is like just one of those iconic things. So incredible. I thought I wasn't going to get iconic in this episode. Power life.

It has so much personality. Like knowing Grace Jones, that sounds. like what she looks like to me. Let's play the strings section where they really come in in full kind of studio 54, kind of harkening back to her roots with its very dramatic strings, lush, that bring our song to their final chorus. Listen to that. I mean, honestly, Justice, Ketranata, somebody needs to sample that. That's, well, it was a funny story about this. So in the strings, I'll play the isolated strings in that exact moment.

A broken scale, which is in a weird way what that is, always sounds good to me. Because you kind of know where it's going next, but when it's surprised you by going minor or something. So this is chromatic like on the shock episode because it's descending one half step at a time. So it's chromatic. That's the word for that.

I did that chromatic shit. The funny story behind this is that when Grace heard it back in the studio, she made a joke, she said that it sounded like a game show. It sounded like an introduction to like Johnny Carson. So famously, she then plunks down in the microphone. She plunks herself in the booth and she sings this. I love that. Which to anyone who grew up in the 80s recognizes as being a reference to this.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, here. Ed McMahon on the Johnny Carson show. We are now to a place that I know any good Grace Jones fan has been waiting for. We don't want the bad ones on this show. You're a bad Grace Jones fan. Even the bad ones that have been waiting for this. You're baddie. That's something.

We're going to hear, even her baddy friends, we're going to hear her vocals. Let's do it. And I would say, you know what? You have the choice. Play it from any section. There is one section I want to hear, but you play it from any section you're dying to play. I'm going to start it from verse one. We're called day as men who know wheels must turn to keep the flow.

When she goes down to the low, no, it's the best, isn't it? It's a surprise. It's a surprise. And it's a test. meant how good of a singer she is. That's really hard to nail. And then she goes on to sing a couple more lines that are iconic, like this one. Build on up, don't break the chain.

Sparks will fly when the whistle blow. Now it's very clear that this song started its life as slave to the rhythm of the chain game. Yeah. Because she's talking literally about don't break the chain and, you know, men work all days, men who know wheels must turn to keep the flow. Yeah. Absolutely. And the characters that she's playing, the way she says, Spock's, it's so dramatic. There's so much drama in it. Sparks, Will Spock's. And if you hear interviews with her, like, she has a shifting, a shape-shifting accent a little bit. Like, sometimes she just sounds like an American who grew up in Syracuse.

Exactly. And then sometimes she has this a little bit of a Jamaican lint. And then other times it's more of sort of a London-British accent. Yeah. I heard in this, she's dropping the R, so it's Spock's. I think, in her defense, there's like, there's that sponge thing going on. Like, I think anybody who's, like, anybody who's, like, trying to. absorb many different types of culture. They're going to pick up little bits of everybody's language. I think that's right. And here is the pre-chorus. Never stop the action. Keep it up, keep it up. By the way, I found in the multi-tracks there's an unused harmony underneath it,

which was sung by Tessa Niles. So I'm just going to play. Why does that sound familiar? Well, Niles is, I believe she was at a certain point married to the orchestral arrangers, Richard Niles. But I'm not sure if they were married when they did. when they did this. Maybe they're just homies. They're still working together. But she's saying a lot of unused stuff, and I'll play it for you in the mix. Sparks will fly. So she's just doing

that. I'll play it isolated. That's Sparks will fly. Sparks will fly. She does it a few times, just punctuating a line here and there. Wheels must turn. But they ended up muting it. It's not on the final version. Now, I say that, and importantly, as alluded to before, there's not only this canonical, this is the single, there's also seven other variations on the song. some of which reuse some of the recordings, some of them replay them, some of them are her. Grace had two takes of this vocal, and the second take was used in some of the other versions. There's all the remixes. So those harmonies, I think we hear in the world in one of the 500 versions of the song that exists,

but they're not in the canonical single version. And now let's hear the chorus. Work to the rhythm. the rhythm love to the rhythm slave to the rhythm I love her voice so much I do too I especially love the love to the rhythm line because when you put it with the synths and the strings for whatever reason that one in particular I feel the the sort of the swell of the soul can we hear the chorus with the strings and synth underneath it.

But nothing else. Can we just hear that? Let's do that. Here's the third chorus, and then I'll start to bring in some of those strings, the most dramatic moment of the song. Here we go. We live to the rhythm, and we work to the rhythm. Love to the rhythm.

Slave to the rhythm. There's that ladies and gentlemen. That part is so great. There's an unused harmony too in the chorus. The whole chorus is harmonized and they decided not to use it. So it would have sounded like this. Slave. You know, it's just one take.

It's one track. I don't hear a second track at least. There might be another one very buried. But for the most part, Grace carries it. Her voice is so strong that you're essentially. hearing a single track of her singing underneath this gigantic mountain of music underneath it, which is so powerful with the strings and pads. We don't forget how great her voice is, but sometimes you don't appreciate how great her voice

is. Before we get out of the vocals, play us the axe to the wood verse just so that we have it. Yeah. Axe to wood. So dramatic. A lot of gaps. In ancient times. I meant to say a lot of space in there in between lines and then man machine so growly power line i mean i can't get enough of power lines yeah line is so sexy and so great and so emotive like she's doing a lot with a little lyrically speaking and melodic like there's not a lot of lines but she's conveying so much emotion and so much with her voice can we hear fires burn heartbeat's yeah and by the way there's an unused harmony i'm just noticing in that i'll play it for you without it first Fire burn

Hearts be strong Sing out loud The chain gang song But there's a melody in there You're going to play first Yeah there's a harmony that Tessa Niles sang that is not in the final version And here it is by itself

Fire burn Hearts beat strong Sing out loud And she doesn't do that last one She's like I'm leaving that That last line alone. Here it is in the mix. Fire burn.

Hearts be strong. Sing out loud. And then Tessa's like I'm out. The chain gang song. That's all Grace right there. That is all grace. It is all good Grace. It is all good.

Such a masterful performance. You know, Grace Jones sort of famously, we talked about and her litheness of a figure. But she always has short hair too, which in that era was, you know, was a unusual. She was, she, she, she, she, and like a flat top, by the way. She made it, um, I don't want to say okay.

Yeah. Because, I mean, like, we're still talking about a time when people can lose their jobs. If they give any, unless they're like the hairdresser, they can lose their jobs for just coming out of the closet. So I don't want to say she made it okay to be gay or by, but like, you know, I will say that I think that she let a whole generation of bisexual people and gay people know, hey, there are more of us out there.

With that said, that short haircut, her style of dress, that Androgyny we've talked about, like it's all very butch, you know, like to use the... Well, that's what I was going to say. In my head, it just flashed, because 1984, I went to the Olympics that year with my dad,

and that's the Olympics of Carl Lewis. Yeah. And it popped, and I'm like, holy shit, wait, Carl Lewis, did he take his haircut inspiration from Grace Jones? Not that it didn't exist before, But Grace Jones's use of that flat top was so iconic in 1983, 84. And let's get some flowers to Grace.

She is absolutely still alive, which is awesome. And I hope that she comes on the show. As we wrap up this episode, luxury, what do you think is the legacy of Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones, other than the fact that it is, as you put it, the perfect song. You know, it's a perfect song for a lot of reasons in my mind. But even in this listening, more reasons are being added to it. Because I think as a listener all these years,

I was listen, as we often do with music, to just the sound of it. and all of the sounds are pristine and gratifying and the chords we were talking about and the bass line and the drums, all of them do something to me that is why I love music and make it and talk about it. This is just what I want every single time.

But Grace Jones herself brings something kind of umami to it, like an extra layer, like a third dimension of like her powerful persona and how she looks and who she is in the world. But in this listen and preparing and discussing it with you, I realize it's so obvious. It's right there. but slave to the rhythm of the chain gang, that layer of it being,

having this layer of like it being a black woman singing a song that's called slave to the rhythm. And having this Jean-Paul Good thing. And frankly, having the Trevor Horn and Steve Lippes and all of these and Chris Blackwell from Ireland is a black woman who worked with a lot of, well, I was going to say a lot of white men. Oh, yes, that's interesting.

But also men, but in particular a lot of white men and Andy Warhol. And, you know, so it's interesting to just think of that package. And I think to go back to our conversation about Jean-Paul Gude, I think she was participating in it with agency, like as a collaborator. But at the same time, you know, pictures of her were manipulated by the photographer to extend her body, et cetera, to make it different. And aspects of the song and the music were manipulated after the performances by these men as well.

So I'm just thinking about all of that in the mix. And it adds another dimension to me. Well, listen, I love that. I think that for me personally, this is an artist I could do several episodes about because we haven't even touched on. We mentioned nightclubbing and walking in the rain and some of the other ones, but like it's occurring to me now. We didn't talk about her cover of Use Me with Bill Withers. We didn't talk about The Hunter gets captured. Yes.

Marbley. Inspiration is one of the songs that I have only recently come across that I think is a great Grace Jones song. I guess what I'm saying, most of our listeners have heard of Grace Jones. A lot of them probably, like me, don't realize how deep her catalog goes. So discover the apple stretching, discover breakdown, discover, I've seen that face before, discover some of these other songs. And if you don't already know it, please discover this perfect song. Slave to the Rhythm.

Okay, luxury, it's time for one more song. This is a segment where we share a deep cut or a hidden gym with you, the One Song Nation and with each other. Please go first. Well, Grace Jones didn't stop making music. She still does. And one of my favorite Grace Jones songs, which we've listed, so many that we both love, but I didn't even get to this one. The list is so long. There's a track

she does called Williams Blood, and there's an aeroplane remix, which when it came out was back in the sort of Blog House era when I was making music. And so the sound of this, when I listened back the other day, I was like, wow, this really takes me back to the Blog House era. It's those sounds. So here's Williams Blood, Airplane Remix. It's so powerful. It kills on the dance floor. It is so 2008. It's so grimy. It's so grimy. Yeah, yeah. What about you, Diyah? What is your one more song this week? Well, interestingly enough, while researching the Grace Jones episode, I stumbled across, I kid you not, there was a variety show in Italy called Strix, and it was supposed to be set in the underworld. And that's already a very bizarre setting for a variety show.

But Grace Jones performed on it, and I also was reminded of how much, and they had a lot of really cool artists perform on this show. But one of the artists that performed on the show was one of my favorites, Gal Costa, and she performed a live version of her song, Relance. I love how crazy this is. So Gal Costa is from Brazil, and the type of music that she is most known for is a type of popular music in Brazil called Tropicalia. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Relance is one of those songs, I'm hoping I'm pronouncing it right. The internet will surely correct me.

It's one of those songs that, you know, back when you're not. I used to DJ at the standard hotel and do a lot of daytime parties. This was a very cool sort of breezy, brazilian song that you could put on, and people would dance to it. And they didn't know what she was saying, but they really responded to it. So that's my one more song for today. Oh, I love that. Great choice.

As always, if you have an idea for one more song, you can find us on Instagram and TikTok. You can find me on Instagram at Diallo, D-I-A-L-L-L-O, and on TikTok at DiL-O-R-R-L-O. You can find me on Instagram at Luxury, L-X-X-U-X-Y, and on TikTok, at L-U-X-X-U-X-U-Y-X-X. You can also watch full episodes of One Song now on YouTube. That's right. Just search for One Song podcast. We'd love it if you'd like and subscribe.

And if you made it this far, I think that means you like this podcast. So please don't forget to give us five stars, five, the most stars you can give. Leave a review and share the podcast with someone you think would like it because it helps keep it going. It sure does. All right, luxury. Help me in this episode. I'm producer, DJ, songwriter. musicologist luxury. And I'm actor, writer-director, and sometimes DJ, Diallo-Riddle.

And this is one song. We'll see you next time.