Viva Grace!

It happened quite by accident, actually, says Grace Jones of her latest album, Hurricane, smiling, all faux disinterest. I didnt plan to record anymore. The first new material she has released in 19 years, it replicates its title in each dynamically constructed groove. If a 60-year-old woman is not supposed to act with the indecent funk of it all, no one has bothered to tell Ms. Jones. When she semiretired in the early 90s, gays mourned the loss of their special relationship with the pop colossus. The clubs missed her too, though hipster DJs everywhere continued to close choice sets with La Vie en Rose. Reappearing at Junes Meltdown Festival on Londons South Bank, baring buttocks, oozing preposterous glamour, and gamely sporting a succession of outr headgear by renowned milliner Philip Treacy, it was as if Jones had never been away. A sweet old fruit next to me confessed that hed lost his virginity in Brixton after her 1982 bellwether pop-art performance A One Man Show, an anecdote she would have relished. Joness has been a story replete with sex, drugs, and rock n roll. Does she regret it? Oh, God, no! Its the abuse that is badnot the use. She blames genetics for her natural disposition toward the more louche end of the pop spectrum. We are all quite mad, she says of her family. [My mother] always told me that I am a man-izer and my grandfather was a womanizer. And Im always getting high. Shed say Cool it. Cool it, as if I was going to die young, like him. But Jones never has cooled it. In a 35-year career that spans sharing an apartment in the 1970s with Marie Helvin and Jerry Hall as a model in Paris (an early couture peak) to her latest suite of audacious and highly personal musical stories, Jones has set a succession of precedents combining art and music. Hurricanes centerpiece is a sensational pileup of piano loops, gospel choirs, and ravishing strings called Williams Blood. Its classic Jones, another rewriting of the rules by a fierce black woman. And why not? I am Grace Jones, she says. I can do anything I choose. Paul Flynn Hurricane is available November 3 as an import on Wall of Sound.Send a letter to the editor about this article.