Ravinia 2025 Issue 1

Whether their fans originally gathered at Studio 54 or on Snapchat, Grace Jones and Janelle Monáe are two visionary performers whose work spans genres, media, and generations. Here’s a quick dive into their careers: GRACE JONES “I was outside of race and gender,” Jones writes in her 2015 autobiography, cheek- ily titled I’ll Never Write My Memoirs . “I considered myself energy that had not been classified.” And that’s probably the best over- view of the titan known as Grace Jones, whose official height is listed as 5’8” but who always looms larger than life. As for her official age, well, figures exist online, but she’s been elusive for decades about the actual number. A decade ago, her autobiography allowed that she was sixty-something. Do your own math. The Jamaican diva was raised partly by her grandparents, who were religious zealots. Before she escaped to the United States in her teens, her step-grandfa- ther would beat Grace and her siblings with switches and whips. She attended a community college near Syracuse, but quickly bounced into nightlife in Philadelphia, earning money as a go-go dancer. From there, she took up model- ing in New York and then Paris, and her multi-hyphenate career truly began. She recorded her first album in 1977, which in and of itself showed the same mind-boggling range that Jones exemplified in her life: Tracks included her interpretations of “La Vie en Rose” (originally made famous by Edith Piaf 30 years earlier) and Stephen Sond- heim’s “Send in the Clowns,” while also spawning her first club hit: “I Need a Man.” Clearly, the gays were destined to love her from the start—and indeed, she ended up artistically collaborating with some of the late 20th century’s most famous queer artists, including Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. Unsurprisingly, Jones’s love life is wildly colorful. She’s had casual flings with the likes of Oscar-winning film- maker Quentin Tarantino and super- model Janice Dickinson. Long-term relationships happened with famous French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, who shot several of her album covers and whose 1982 book, Jungle Fever , featured a snarling Jones inside a cage; and with Swedish actor-model Dolph Lundgren, whose career Jones helped boost by getting him cast in the 1985 James Bond flick A View to a Kill . Both professionally and personally, Goude understood Jones’s androgynous, animalistic appeal—just unquantifiable enough to entice many different demo- graphics. As he told People magazine, “Men think she’s sexy. Women think she’s a little masculine. Gays think she’s a drag queen.” “ I was outside of race and gender . I considered myself energy that had not been classified. ” RAVINIAMAGAZINE • JUNE 6 – JUNE 15, 2025 10 KRISTIANSIBAST