Model, actress and ’80s music icon Grace Jones is calling out some of the today’s chart-topping pop stars for biting her style.
Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Kanye West, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga are all targets of the “A View to a Kill” James Bond baddie in her upcoming autobiography “I’ll Never Write My Memoirs.”
“Trends come along and people say, ‘Follow that trend.’ There’s a lot of that around at the moment: ‘Be like Sasha Fierce. Be like Miley Cyrus. Be like Rihanna. Be like Lady Gaga. Be like Rita Ora and Sia. Be like Madonna,” Grace wrote, in a excerpt that was published by Time Out on Wednesday.
While Jones didn’t mention Beyoncé by name, Sasha Fierce is Queen Bey’s alter ego.
“I cannot be like them — except to the extent that they are already being like me,” Jones continued. “I have been so copied by those people who have made fortunes that people assume I am that rich. But I did things for the excitement, the dare, the fact that it was new, not for the money, and too many times I was the first, not the beneficiary.”
Jones, who had a string of hit singles including “I Need a Man,” “Private Life” and “Slave to the Rhythm,” claims that every modern day pop star is trying to rip her off in some way.
“Rihanna … she does the body-painting thing I did with Keith Haring, but where he painted directly on my body, she wears a painted bodysuit,” she critiqued. “That’s the difference. Mine is on skin; she puts a barrier between the paint and her skin. I don’t even know if she knows that what she’s doing comes from me, but I bet you the people styling her know. They know the history.”
Jones also referred to another pop star as “Doris,” who she says “looks lost, like she is desperately trying to find the person she was when she started.”
As the rest of the millennial generation, Jones is not impressed. “They dress up as though they are challenging the status quo, but by now, wearing those clothes, pulling those faces, revealing those tattoos and breasts, singing to those fractured, spastic, melting beats – that is the status quo,” she wrote. “You are not off the beaten track, pushing through the thorny undergrowth, finding treasure no one has come across before. You are in the middle of the road.”
“I’ll Never Write My Memoirs” hits shelves on Sept. 29.