A single song stretched across an entire album sounds like a dare, the kind of idea a label greenlights once and then regrets. On October 28, 1985, Grace Jones released Slave to the Rhythm, her seventh studio album, and the dare was printed right on the cover: the subtitle called it a biography. The record contained eight tracks, every one of them a different version of the same composition. The singer had spent nearly three years away from music, acting in films, and she returned with a record that refused to behave like a normal pop album.
From a Frankie Goes to Hollywood demo
The song itself began life as a would-be follow-up to the smash hit "Relax" by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Producer Trevor Horn, the founder of the label ZTT Records, had the material ready, but the project was handed to Grace Jones instead. With co-writers Bruce Woolley, Simon Darlow and Stephen Lipson, Horn reshaped the song for a performer whose image was as sharp as her voice. Jones, Horn and Lipson then built a new version roughly every week, treating the original melody as raw material to be cut, stretched and rebuilt.
The budget swelled to almost 385 thousand dollars for one song, an absurd figure for a concept that most artists would have abandoned after the first demo. Instead, the album grew stranger with each layer. Fragments of interviews with Grace Jones, conducted by journalists Paul Morley and Paul Cook, were woven between the music. The actor Ian McShane contributed an off-screen voice reading passages from the book Jungle Fever by Jean-Paul Goude, who was then Jones's partner and also created the cover. That artwork was a montage of several copies of one photograph of Jones, making her hair look impossibly long and her mouth stretched wide.
Chart success and a vanished second single
The first single, simply titled "Slave to the Rhythm," became the biggest chart success of Grace Jones's career. The song topped the Billboard dance chart in 1985 and gave the album a commercial foothold in Europe, where it reached the top ten in German-speaking countries and the Netherlands. A second single, "Jones the Rhythm," arrived at the end of the year but disappeared almost without a trace. There was no video for it and almost no promotion, as if the record company had spent its belief and its money on the first shot.
The album's strangeness was not a gimmick layered on after the fact; it was the method. Every version of the song examined a different face of the same idea, from the propulsive single version to fragments built from vocal samples. The spoken interviews turned the record into a kind of audio documentary, while McShane's narration gave it the tone of a strange fashion film. Slave to the Rhythm asked a pop audience to accept repetition as drama, to hear the same melody as eight different stories.
Slave to the Rhythm asked a pop audience to accept repetition as drama, to hear the same melody as eight different stories.
The risk paid for itself in the long run. Slave to the Rhythm became one of the most commercially successful albums of Grace Jones's career, moving around one million copies worldwide by the end of 1986. It proved that a pop star could return from a film career with a record that challenged every expectation of what an album should be. The title track gave her a dance-floor anthem that still sounds like a command, while the album around it remains a puzzle that rewards close listening.