"Into The Groovey"

The unimpeachable champions of alternative rock and pop's Material Girl par excellence. What could possibly connect Sonic Youth and Madonna? Apparently nothing, most would think. Others, better informed, might however mention the ineffable pop incarnation of Sonic Youth, the parody band Ciccone Youth, created in 1988 on the initiative of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. It was a side-project of the New York band, born out of a growing interest in pop music and, in particular, a self-mocking passion for the young popstar named Madonna Louise Ciccone. The project also featured Mike Watt, bassist of Minutemen and Firehose, J Mascis, leader of Dinosaur Jr., and Greg Ginn, founder of punk band Black Flag. It all amounted to a single record, titled "The Whitey Album" (1988), anything but pop: within its grooves, in fact, one can detect a pronounced experimental attitude, devoted to sound manipulation and noise. Released in a limited run, it would go on to become a cult item among collectors, until its 2006 reissue courtesy of Geffen.

Few, however, are aware of the underground ties that, in the shadow of the Big Apple, linked the standard-bearers of alt-rock's "Daydream Nation" to the popstar of "Like A Virgin", as noted by the magazine Far Out. Madonna, in fact, had taken her first musical steps after settling in the East Village at the height of New York's punk revolution, with bands like Ramones and Blondie at the peak of their trajectory, while the subversive underground of no wave was only just beginning to infiltrate the scene. What's more, the young Ciccone frequented alternative artistic circles orbiting around Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Inevitably, that climate left its mark on her, even though she had arrived in the Big Apple with ambitions of becoming a dancer. Together with her then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy, Madonna even went on to found the new wave band Breakfast Club, before forming her own band, Emmy and the Emmys, and launching, a few years later, the solo career that would establish her as a pop icon.

These were, in short, the very same circuits in which the young band led by Thurston Moore moved, and Sonic Youth remained anything but indifferent to the Madonna phenomenon even after her mainstream breakthrough. "No one really knows that part of her story," Moore told the Guardian in 2018, referring to Madonna's early ties to the no wave scene from which Sonic Youth themselves would later emerge, "She was in a no wave band before Swans. There's a whole intertwined history in New York between Madonna and the no wave scene."

So Moore and Kim Gordon began performing wearing t-shirts dedicated to the singer. A gesture that might have seemed provocative, almost a caricature aimed at their most orthodox fans, but which in fact reflected a genuine interest. And in the mid-1980s, while Madonna continued to build on her success, Sonic Youth — among the most representative standard-bearers of the no wave legacy — decided to pay tribute to those unexpected beginnings, adopting the alias Ciccone Youth, taken from the singer's birth surname.

The first concrete outcome of this curious “fascination” arrived in 1986 with the 7" “Burnin' Up”, containing two reinterpretations of Madonna songs. The title track, handled vocally by Mike Watt, dismantles the original with a stripped-down, abrasive treatment: guitars cut to the bone, driving drums and a guttural vocal that erased every trace of the original pop sheen.

On the B-side, a few seconds of “Tuff Titty Rap” lead into “Into The Groovey”, a bare-bones, jittery take on the massive hit “Into The Groove”. Moore delivers it with apparent detachment, wrapped in jagged guitars and taut basslines, until a finale in which Madonna's own filtered voice surfaces like a pop ghost. Half tribute, half satire, slowed down and deliberately dissonant, “Into The Groovey” marked a departure from Sonic Youth's usual sound, yet was rewarded with unusually strong sales. Without ever trying to compete with the original, it became, against all odds, a dancefloor favorite towards the end of the Eighties, drawing a line between Madonna's no wave roots and her subsequent pop stardom.

But the merry Ciccone Youth crew would develop a taste for it, eventually churning out an entire LP, titled in Beatles-esque fashion “The Whitey Album”, its cover emblazoned with an enlarged image of Madonna's face, used with the singer's direct consent, who remembered the members of Sonic Youth from the days of New York's Danceteria, the crossroads of the era's art and music scene.

Besides the tracks already released, the record gathers a series of disparate, deliberately eccentric episodes. Among them stands out a cover of Robert Palmer's “Addicted To Love”, turned into a bizarre multimedia experiment, with a backing track faithful to the original and vocals recorded in a karaoke booth, also used for the accompanying homemade video, in which a sulky Kim Gordon dances leaning against a guitar, almost mimicking the models from the original clip.

Sonic Youth also used the project to revisit part of their own catalogue. “The Whitey Album” in fact features a new version of “Making The Nature Scene”, already present on their 1983 debut: while the first incarnation was dominated by an abrasive no wave framework, here Gordon introduces unexpected vocal elements, arriving at an unprecedented, almost rap-like inflection.

Overall, the Ciccone Youth project revealed a clear direction: playing with the technologies and idioms of the era – drum machines, sampling, pop aesthetics – to build a deliberately unstable, experimental hybrid. An eccentric, uneven work, long underrated, yet able to put two seemingly irreconcilable worlds into dialogue.

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21/04/2026