"Was," or is, you might say, then, since the reason that the future is so conspicuous by its absence involves omnipresent palmed-quarter substitutions of "was" for "is." So that slows us down a little. But I want to try to be clear, and I want to assure any worried readers that yes, this really does involve a record that I love. The record is a reissue: Cristina's oomny 1984 eggiweg Sleep It Off. Ze Records has reissued it, along with her sole other album, and we should all be grateful. I only just now discovered, having written the preceding paragraph-and-a-half, that Ze's website bears the legend "THE FUTURE IS HISTORY." Ahem. Cough sputter wheeze. Well, yes: that's kind of the issue, then, isn't it?

Sleep It Off shared temporal breathing space with Like a Virgin, but its vision of a reconfigured public sexuality gasped in vain for some of the rare air that keeps careers alive. Madonna's vision, or various readings thereof, won the day. When I listen to Sleep It Off's queasily high-strung triumphs, though, I get a little misty — I do — about what might have been. I have no illusions: there are & were greater forces at work, and pop music is as much symptom as cause. Still. The sexual politics of the future were once a lively arena in which daily scrimmages were run by wild-eyed boys and girls, and Panzer Division Madonna razed that arena to the ground, speedily building up a Super Target on the cleared lot.

Here I feel like equivocating a little, and pointing out I don't mean to indict Maddy personally (or Gwen Stefani, or Beyonce, or Britney, or Shania, or Li'l Kim), but in the end if that's what I end up doing then I'm OK with that. I think of these artists more as observers of the changeover than as its architects; I don't think I do them any disservice by describing them that way, since I think of most historical agents as wide receivers on a windless Sunday somewhere in time. If a ball's in the air and you've got a shot at it, shouldn't you run with it, so long as nobody gets hurt? Of course you should. In a sense, that's your job. So there are no villains here.

There are, however, victims; or, if you don't like that word, there are losers. One hopes that art will have the last laugh, and that Sleep It Off will someday boast a cadre of admirers who can't fairly be called a "loyal cult following." One doesn't hope too hard, though. Because this is an album whose idea of fun is to lift up its skirt just high enough so you can see the horrible bruises not only on the inner thighs, but on the great meaty fronts of them, too, traveling up all the way to the hip. This is an album whose vision of the future understands role-playing not as a tool for self-realization but as a substitute for communication. There is a big difference between fucking for pleasure and fucking for money, and only one of the two is really revolutionary. The former eventually demands that we ask ourselves what we mean by "pleasure," and what it means to us. The latter only asks that we like ourselves well enough to decorate our living rooms tastefully.

Sorry if this is all a bit high-minded. There were some great heavy metal records I wanted to write about before Sleep It Off intruded upon my life, aggressively out of time, beckoning from the clouded mirror of its lost vision. And now that I'm home from work for the next couple of months, I'm gonna get to ‘em all soon enough. But what I hear in Cristina's voice, and in the transparently hollow instrumental accompaniments that hold it captive in the echo chamber, is something very special. It's a message from a future that didn't ever actually happen; more importantly, it's explicitly about the future, the real one I mean, which did happen, and in which we now live, and in which many of Cristina's pet themes still have a place. What makes all this so disorienting is that this future, our home, insists always that it brought with it the end of all progress. All our knotty problems, and our sweaty methods of daily escape? All the zones we created within ourselves to shield us from a world at cross-purposes with ourselves? No longer necesssary! Asked and answered!

Such assertions are quite false, of course, but pitching camp on false assertions is par for the political course, and making gender politics look dated was a big priority for the patriarchy, which has largely succeeded on this front. The Madonna-Britney-Stefani-Beyonce axis (again, not posited as an evil plot to undermine progress; still, though...) insists that since women can show their breasts in public and sleep with as many people as they like, we must therefore have moved beyond a world in which women make less money than men for doing the same work. And/or it must be true that we no longer live in a country where a man has to beat his wife nearly to death before the local police will take any interest in the matter. Certainly it's "shrill," and "politically correct," "angry" "feminist" "ranting" if one argues that a well-paid whore who lives a comfortable life might yet have issues better addressed by some method other than exploiting oneself, and that a culture feigning disinterest in this question might well have interests of its own to protect in claiming to have "moved on."
I miss the sexual politics of the future. I miss the future in general, of course, but that's a broader path that might lead us down into the Cavern of Ultimate Sadness, so I'm not going to venture along the way quite so far. I've got to take it one bridge at a time. And as far as I'm concerned the first one, which we never really got over, was gender.

Which is why I miss the sexual politics of the imagined future, where (as on Sleep It Off) nothing had been solved, and men still beat women and sometimes the women even liked it, and the people who wanted to defend them were made into figures of fun; where, again, sometimes the women beat the men as hard as they were being beaten, and then burned down the living room while quite drunk, and then had ugly unpleasant consensual sex on the sidewalk in the shadow of the flames. I miss the notion of a future in which we still had work to do, and in which our own enlightenment was itself viewed with great suspicion, because any enlightenment we gain comes only through a system of "checks and balances," which is to say, "weights and pulleys." I miss actual radio- and dancefloor-ready pop songs whose basslines dripped goo all over stalactite-cold guitar fragments as the singer vamped with couplets like this:

She needed his strength, he needed her fear
She's scared of the dark, he's scared that he's queer

It's the ambition that I miss, I guess. It's the willingness to step out into territory in which one might or might not feel comfortable. It's a desire to truly and genuinely engage the culture with which one feels both at war & in love. Sleep It Off is lush, beautiful pop music; you wouldn't notice what it's about unless you consciously decided to pay attention to it; but it wants to be exactly this while asking, coyly but honestly, whether its paterland isn't really a horrible killing machine that eats dreams for breakfast. What I miss is a thing caught in the aughts and ones of this album, and it's sweet and wistful now, not in-play and consequently transformed almost beyond recognition. But I miss the sexual politics of the future. I do. They were something to feel rather prouder of than what we wound up settling for.