WEHO Times and Rolling Stone recently announced that Grace Jones will headline the Saturday lineup for the OUTLOUD WeHo (West Hollywood) Pride Music festival on June 2 and 4, 2023. Grace Jones – two words, two syllables, many icons, many universes, the reference for diva – is an intergalactic Jamaican Afrofuturist being from a Nalo Hopkinson novel according to good friends who like to challenge mainstream assumptions of a raceless future.
Dr. Alondra Nelson started the online community called Afrofuturism to connect Black people’s aspirations, imagination and innovations for the future. For Nelson, racial identity that fundamentally influenced technocultural practices fueled the exploration of African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction, and speculative fiction. Jones exemplifies this iconic exploration pushing back to explode the notion of a raceless future. Multi-genre, Jones unsettles connections across geographies, land masses, and cultural production.
Jones is an Afrofuturistic icon and elder weaving and unraveling a genealogy of radical Black people from the Caribbean. As a speculative performer of genuine life, her imagination, imaginary, image, persona, and person transcends category, a deluxe Janelle Monae who Monae wouldn’t have been without Grace Jones, and Grace Jones would not have been without Janelle Monae.
In 2020, Grace Before Jones: Camera, Disco, Studio featured works by some 50 artists including Robert Mapplethorpe and Jean-Paul Goode to “question black image-making and gender binarism as well as both performance and the performance of life.” Around the same time, Huck Mag offered an in-depth and personal look at Jones’s impact on culture, fashion, gender-bending and the significance of skin color and political forces during the 1980s.
Look for Grace Jones in the upcoming Dirty Computer’s Emotion Picture where Monáe stars as Jane 57821, Tessa Thompson as Zen, and Jayson Aaron as Ché. While you’re at it, Janelle Monae’s Afrofuturistic anthology – The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer– comes highly recommended.
OutLoud WeHo is the entertainment promoter bringing Grace Jones to the festival, dedicated to supporting queer artists. This WeHo Pride Music festival, like many pride events, entails a celebration of the millions of resilient LGBTQ+ individuals and a reminder that their presence is the basis of the community. OutLoud’s goal is to bring the queer festival experience to towns across the U.S. where queer artists might not otherwise get a chance to immerse themselves in a queer festival experience. Let’s support our queer artists and look forward to the OUTLOUD WeHo Pride Music festival this June.
