Lost Notes: 1980 - Ep. 7: Grace Jones

Lost Notes: Groupies

KCRW

Music History, Documentary, Society & Culture, Music

4.7 • 721 Ratings

🗓️ 24 September 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In 1980, anti-disco sentiment was at a high and Grace Jones was coming off a trilogy of disco albums. If she stayed stagnant, it felt like her career could be swept away. And so out of disco’s death rattle – driven by the discomfort of white male tastemakers – Grace Jones rose, reinforced and reimagined in a new decade freshly obsessed with risk.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I think the thing about 1980 in general was musically we saw a lot of people saying,
0:10.8	well, I'm going to just try something.
0:12.2	I'm going to try something different because the turn of a new decade,
0:16.4	I think particularly in 1980, really, I think, inspired people to think towards risk and rethink their
0:23.9	relationship with failure and grace Jones was was kind of perfect for that as someone who was
0:30.8	consistently and constantly evolving herself aesthetically sonically creatively creatively creatively
0:35.6	creatively just embodied so much.
0:39.3	There's this thing that I hear black women say a lot now that I kind of agree wholly with about how black women are often creating towards a future where people will be checking for them more robustly.
0:50.3	And I think Grace Jones is really in that lineage of someone who was creating for a
0:55.6	future that people were not yet prepared for. And I think the first real step in that direction is
1:01.3	Warm Letherette, which is not as celebrated as nightclubbing, the album that came after it. And maybe not
1:08.7	as celebrated as living my life, the album that came after nightclubbing.
1:11.6	But without Worm Leatherette, those albums don't happen. Without her starting her work with the Compass Point All-Stars, those other two albums don't exist.
1:19.6	Hi, I'm Hanif Abduraki. From KCRW, this is Lost Notes, 1980. Grace Jones. July 12th,
1:32.7	1979, hours after Minnie Ripperton died in her husband's arms at Cedar-Signy Medical Center
1:39.0	in Los Angeles, fans began to make their way into Comiskey Park in Ripperton's hometown of Chicago, not as part of a memorial, but part of a promotion.
1:50.0	Fans entered the park with disco records tucked underneath their arms.
1:58.0	The Chicago White Sox are brought to you by the following participating advertisers.
2:00.0	The 1979 Chicago White Sox season was mired in mediocrity.
2:04.8	As the calendar crawled into midsummer, when most teams were stepping back and assessing
2:09.2	what a run at the playoffs could look like, the White Sox were a handful of games under 500.
2:15.6	Worse even was their attendance, which had begun slowly slipping around
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.