Ciccone Youth: When Sonic Youth secretly recorded a tribute to Madonna
While it tends to have been brushed under the carpet somewhat, it’s no secret that Madonna spent time in the late 1970s in a couple of no-wave groups. While her two bands, The Breakfast Club and Spinal Root Gang, which contained two members who went on to join an early incarnation of noise rockers Swans, were both short-lived, it was her first taste of life in the entertainment sphere despite bearing little resemblance to where her career would take her.
It didn’t take her long to completely reinvent herself as the queen of pop during the ’80s, but that doesn’t mean that her connection to New York’s musical underbell didn’t continue, and while she was enjoying chart success around the world, she was still keeping tabs on the scene she had once been a part of. One band that she would have been aware of the early murmurations of was Sonic Youth, and while their music seems a far cry from that of Madonna’s, there’s actually more mutual respect between the two than you might realise.
Sonic Youth were unabashedly big fans of Madonna’s, and didn’t care that her pop dominance was seemingly at odds with their experimental and avant-garde credentials. To demonstrate just how much of an appreciation they had for her work, the group recorded two covers of her hit singles, ‘Burning Up’ and ‘Into the Groove’ in 1986, and released them under the name Ciccone Youth; a cheeky nod to Madonna’s actual surname that vaguely hinted that they were the ones responsible.
It didn’t take long for people to join the dots that Sonic Youth were the masterminds behind these unusual covers, with Thurston Moore’s dry monotone battling it out with Madonna’s sampled vocals on the renamed ‘Burnin’ Up’ and ‘Into the Groovey’. However, if you were expecting Sonic Youth to have done a down-the-line accurate interpretation of the two tracks (although why would you) then think again, these two tracks are out there even by their standards, with ominous mutant disco basslines and minimalist no-wave stylings wailing over the top in an effort to make them as uncatchy as possible.
Having initially made the two tracks with the help of Minutemen bassist Mike Watt, they would eventually revive the Ciccone Youth project for a full-length LP, The Whitey Album, in 1989. With Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis also on board alongside a handful of other contributors, the full album isn’t just Madonna covers, but sees the band cover all sorts of different styles that one might consider far out of Sonic Youth’s usual lane, including 13 original songs and a choice cover of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted To Love’.
There are so many different experiments on The Whitey Album from tracks that sound like the industrial explorations of Throbbing Gristle, to the more unusual forays into the white-boy hip-hop of the Beastie Boys, although the latter doesn’t feel so out of place for Sonic Youth considering the recent direction that Kim Gordon’s latest ventures have gone in.
While one could accuse Sonic Youth of having created a snooty pastiche of popular music with their mish-mash of sounds on their Ciccone Youth project, it was all done lovingly and with the utmost respect for all of the various scenes they were dipping their toes into. Even Madonna approved of the record, the two covers of her songs and the use of her likeness, and allegedly even stepped in to prevent a lawsuit when her label took umbrage. It’s a bizarre crossover, but one that shows just how interlocked New York’s disparate scenes were during the 1980s.
