Feminist Music Geek

Cover of Sleep It Off; released on ZE in 1984, reissued in 2004

I know it’s poor sport to frame comparisons of artists as “better than worse than” and that this exercise can take on sexist dimensions, especially when talking about women, but I strongly believe that I’d like Lady Gaga better if she was a little bit more like Cristina. Specifically because fewer dance pop artists have been more critical of the wealth and fame machine in recent memory than Ms. Monet-Palaci.

Now, it’s possible that you don’t know who Cristina is. I didn’t know myself until ZE Records reissued her two full-length albums and Pitchfork wrote about them. To be brief, Cristina was a darling of the New York mutant disco scene in the early 1980s and was primed to be the queen of pop before another one-named club denizen took the title. A former Harvard student born from well-to-do parents, she dropped out, started working at The Village Voice, got involved with and later married a British retail heir and ZE Records co-founder Michael Zilkha, and did what any bored society girl might try to do. Start a recording career.

Her sound was at first lush and funky but became more harsh and angular. It was weird and gallery-friendly and oh-so-of-the-moment (in no small part due to producer Don Was). She even got a young Kevin Kline to do a duet with her (1978′s ”Disco Clone”). It was a fun and bubbly time. If you pair anything off either Cristina album with, say, something off Garçons’ Divorce or Queen Samantha’s The Letter, you’ve got a naughty party coming your way.

(Note: Garçons’ Divorce is hard to come by — twice out of print. Maybe this is why I’ve never heard their song “French Boy” at a gay bar, because I totally should. ZE Records has included many of their songs on their Mutant Disco compilations.) 

Now, before you yell “class warfare!” and tune out, let me explain what Cristina did with her clearly classed position and what it contributed to her recording career. Rather than dismiss her upbringing, she made it the point of critical inquiry of her songs, especially in her second album, which is the focus of this post.

Rather than Madonna and Lady Gaga, who came from outsider perspectives that were trying to get inside, Cristina took her position as an insider to write about how the double-dealing, drug addictions, loveless marriages, closeted homosexuality, not-so-closeted homophobia, compromised affairs, high-life careers, elitist education, corporate greed, and luxe trappings (which, by 1984, formed in the wake of considerable gentrification in New York) were empty, cruel, predictable, and stifling to gender and class relations.

Surprisingly, she took all of this toxic material and made it humorous and fun to dance to. Yet at the same time, her music has a pessimistic, sinister edge, nulling any potential lyrical comparison to, say, Vampire Weekend. Much of this is in Cristina’s vocal delivery, which evokes Maude Lebowski‘s deadpan, arched New England finishing school accent. When she sings “I watch my friends decay around me and I view them with distaste”  in Sleep It Off‘s opener “What’s a Girl to Do?,” I can’t help but wonder if she just slipped arsenic into the Dom Pérignon and is watching them die in the corner, burning their wallets with a lighter.

So, yeah. This was pop music. But it wasn’t going to get her on the pop charts. Sleep It Off tanked, perhaps in part because 1984 proved to be such a big year for Madonna, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Texas. After divorcing Zilkha in 1990, she moved back to New York and occasionally writes literary essays. I haven’t read them, but I’m interested. If she fashioned herself as a sort of art-pop Dorothy Parker, her subsequent literary work has gotta be interesting.

But Cristina should also get a little credit for being game about distorting or manipulating her body for artistic purposes and self-reflexive effect (so should Lady Gaga, who often takes couture to cold and weird extremes). In her time, Cristina never did anything wth her look that’s akin to Lady Gaga — perhaps because no one outside the New York art scene was paying much attention, perhaps because she would’ve thought wearing a Kermit the Frog jacket was ridiculous — but she, along with graphic designer Jean-Paul Goude, cooked up the disturbingly beautiful, deliberately strange, and inherently constructed image for her second and final album. Perhaps Goude was really pleased with the look of Sleep It Off, because he did a similar design for Grace Jones the following year.

Cover of Slave to the Rhythm, released in 1985 on Island Records

Cristina’s album cover takes a lovely, modelesque profile shot of the singer and stretches her neck to graceful but useless grotesquery. A long neck on a woman is often remarked upon as an asset, especially for models. It’s also a home for the singer’s instrument. But this neck? And how about the cuts and ridges and hastily applied tape? Whereas Jones’s cover distorts her image in a smoother, more seamless manner, Cristina’s cover is rough, cut-up, and damaged.

Thus, this cover reflects Cristina’s key message — that which is beautiful and idealized in our culture is flawed, and the deception of its perfection is just at the surface.