Grace Jones’s Memoir, titled, “I’ll Never Write My Memoir,“ hit bookshelves yesterday, and it certainly seems like a juicy read (pun intended)!
About pop stars like Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, and Amber Rose being inspired by her style, she told the New York Times, “They make it so obvious. But they don’t quite have the conviction. It’s always someone styling them, for example. It’s not coming from them. People say, ‘Well, you should be flattered.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I’m not.’ Because my whole view is being unique and finding yourself, from your own suffering or your own upbringing or your own happiness. For me, it’s all piggybacking.”
She continued, “I have been so copied by those people who have made fortunes that people assume I am that rich. But I did things for the excitement, the dare, the fact that it was new, not for the money. And too many times I was the first, not the beneficiary. There’s a lot of that around at the moment. Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna. I cannot be like them, except to the extent that they are already being like me.”
Inside the memoir, she reveals her feelings about Kim Kardashian’s Break the Internet Paper Cover, which was inspired by a photograph by Jean Paul Goude (Jones’s frequent collaborator and father to her child).
Jones said “When he took a photograph of Kim Kardashian with a champagne glass perched on her ass in an impossible pose like the ones he did with me over thirty-five years ago, I asked him why he was giving her – a basic commercial product – his ideas? This seemed to contradict his spirit of integrity, which he has protected for so long. Why was he repeating himself, just to give her a little flare of publicity, quickly absorbed by the next puff of self-promotion?”
She continues, “Well, he replied, ‘I got the feeling that if I didn’t do that photograph, she would have simply copied the idea anyway. I might as well copy myself.’ His ideas are are so powerful that repeating them decades later still causes a hell of a fuss, however temporary…He might have done it to wind me up a little as well. Which he did.”
Aside from taking shots at pop stars, it seems she has some great stories (Spin provided a great list of a few).
I’m also interested in learning more about her upbringing in Jamaica, her time as a model, and her storied music career.
Purchase at Target or Amazon.com.
Will you be buying?
Images: Getty/New York Times/Associated Press