Grace Jones
Take a tango by Astor Piazzolla, written in 1974, and put a reggae rhythm section under it ... Sly Dunbar on drums, Robbie Shakespeare on bass, the two Jamaicans who had played on half the records that mattered in Kingston ... Then put Grace Jones in front of it, in a studio in Nassau, and let her speak the verses like a woman describing a man across a room she does not want to be in ...
That is the recipe, and it should not work ... Nightclubbing, from May 1981, is the record where it did ... Chris Blackwell of Island Records and the producer Alex Sadkin had gathered a house band at Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas, and Jones later wrote in her memoir that Blackwell "took all my different worlds and stuck them all together" ... A Jamaican-born model from the Paris fashion world, a tango from Buenos Aires, a rhythm from Kingston ... all in one room by the sea ...
The tune came to her through Jean-Paul Goude, the artist she was with at the time, and the French verse in the middle was translated for her by the actress Nathalie Delon, who got a writing credit for the afternoon's work ... The title is what you say when you recognize someone and wish you hadn't ...
The measure of it is A minor, three chords doing most of the work, at the speed of a fast walk ... a tango's changes with a reggae backbeat pushed underneath, which nobody had thought to do, and Jones on top, sounding like the only person in the club who is completely sober ...