Yesterday happened
to be the one and only legend herself Grace Jones’ birthday – 67 years old and
still going strong (and still being ripped off by other singers and performers. Though we won’t mention them here, it’s pretty obvious who they are).

But in
celebration for her birthday, here’s her classic and totally original French TV commercial
for the French car, the Citroën CX.

Unless you
live in Europe, you may have never heard of the car.
Though it was a popular foreign model in the U.S. during the 1960’s, the car hasn’t
been sold in the U.S. for over 40 years. That’s because, back in 1974, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration officially prohibited passenger vehicles with height-adjustable
suspension in this country.

What that
simply means is that, the driver can actually adjust how high or low the car is
from the ground for better handling and fuel economy. If you’ve seen a Citroën
on the street, most of the time it looks like it’s barely a few inches from the
ground.

But overseas, the CX, which was first introduced in 1974, was a huge success for a while.
However by the mid-80’s, sales were slipping, so the company employed Grace Jones and
her then lover and artist/designer/film director, Jean-Paul Goude, to create a new TV
campaign for their then new CX GTI Turbo model, which you can watch below for
yourself.

For a 45
second spot, its bold and striking, and, at the time, there hadn’t been another car commercial
like it, nor has there been anything like it since then. In fact, the commercial
was actually banned in several countries because of what they deemed “excessive speeding”.
Though I suspect, most likely, that the strong, aggressive, literally larger than life image of a black woman, might
have been just too much for some people to handle in 1985.

See for
yourself: