Programme notes
Grace Jones - La Vie En Rose (live TV 1978)
Summary
A 1977 recording of the Édith Piaf standard, remade as a slow disco piece and performed here on television. The arrangement stretches the song out over a steady rhythm section rather than treating it as a chanson, and Jones delivers it with a deliberate flatness that refuses the sentiment the melody invites.
The performance is as much a piece of staging as a vocal: posture, stillness and costume doing work that most singers would leave to the voice.
Why it matters
It sits at the start of a career that made a career out of refusing categories — disco singer, model, actor, art object — and it demonstrates the method early. Taking a French standard and giving it a New York club rhythm was also, in 1977, a statement about where a Jamaican-born performer working in Paris and New York belonged, which was nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.