Is there truth to Grace Jones dissing today’s stars?

Grace Jones

Grace Jones

This morning I woke up to my Facebook timeline and this article about Grace Jones on the Time Out website: “Grace Jones slays Rihanna, Miley, Gaga and Kanye in this exclusive extract from her autobiography”

With a title like that, you can’t help but be interested to see what it’s about.

While reading it, it’s easy to dismiss what she’s saying. Just write it off to Jones being overconfident, but the article hasn’t let me go, because she does raise a few good points.

Copy Cats

To start with the bottom line; No, I don’t agree with her thoughts of being the originator of extravaganza and eccentric performances and that today’s stars are just copy cats.

My experience, in my professional life, is that you can have a really good idea, even pursue it and make it real, but somebody else, somewhere else (nowhere even near your circles) is also able to think of the same thing.

If they are at the right place, at the right time and make it bigger than you with it, it doesn’t automatically make them copy cats. You were just tuned in to the same frequency and they were dealt the better hand.

Save The Date

The book

The book

This is why I think timestamps, like copyright registrations, but also publications, are so important to any original thinker; artists, inventors, scientists, developers, designers etc. It really gives you something solid to mark when you were having your ideas. But that’s going slightly off-topic.

Tracing Origin

The article has raised a question for me. Can you really trace the true origin of artistry?  In order to create art, artists have to get their inspiration from something. It usually is triggered. The older I get, the more I see the original inspiration seeping through in today’s pop stars: I see Michael Jackson in Usher, Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown and Jason Derulo. I see Prince and Lenny Kravitz in Bruno Mars, Mariah Carey in Ariana Grande, George Michael in Adam Lambert. And the generation before me probably saw Jimi Hendrix in Prince and Lenny Kravitz, where to me they are my originators. They were the ones that introduced me to their style of performance.

Art Creates Art

I think art creates art. Artists bounce off of each other’s work. In my opinion, you are a great artist if you can take your inspiration and turn it into something completely different, but always your own, never a one on one copy.

All the artists that she’s mentioned have done that, or so I think, and so has Jones. Personally, I have never seen or heard anything from Jones but her eccentric artistry, which would make me likely to assume, and agree with her, that she’s probably more authentic in it than today’s stars. Today, a lot of artistic moments are initiated by marketing objectives.

Read more:
“Grace Jones slays Rihanna, Miley, Gaga and Kanye in this exclusive extract from her autobiography” (Time Out)

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