‘Into the Groovey’: When Sonic Youth paid homage to Madonna’s punk beginnings
During the neon-hued pop age of the 1980s, it was difficult to think of anyone more diametrically opposed to the abrasive, DIY rebellion of the punk rock underground than the ‘Queen of Pop’ herself, Madonna. Yet, as people so often forgot, Madonna had her musical beginnings in the realm of New York punk – a fact that Sonic Youth were eager not to forget.
It was in 1978 that Madonna first moved to New York City, settling in the East Village during the height of the area’s punk rock revolution, with groups like The Ramones and Blondie arguably at the top of their game, while the subversive realm of no-wave was just beginning to infect the underground. Inevitably, those DIY sounds had an effect on Madonna, even if she had moved to the Big Apple with dreams of being a dancer. With her then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy, she even ended up forming the new wave outfit Breakfast Club.
Admittedly, Madonna didn’t last very long in that group before forming her own outfit, Emmy and the Emmys, and unleashing the pop mastery of her solo career a few years down the line. Nevertheless, those who were around New York during the late 1970s got to witness the punk and no-wave beginnings of the future cultural icon.
As the 1980s drew to a close, and with Madonna still going from strength to strength, no-wave’s most beloved offspring, Sonic Youth, chose to pay homage to the popstar’s unlikely beginnings, establishing a new alias as Ciccone Youth – taken from Madonna’s legal surname, Ciccone.
Originally spearheaded by the Minutemen’s Mike Watt, the project soon blossomed into an entire album, The Whitey Album, of which the undeniable stand-out was Sonic Youth’s cover of ‘Into The Groove’, the chart-topping Madonna classic released back in 1985.
A slowed-down, fittingly dissonant version of the original, ‘Into The Groovey’ marked something of a departure from Sonic Youth’s typical sound, but one which was rewarded with uncharacteristically high sales figures.
Although it was never going to rival the success of the original – nor was it intended to – ‘Into the Groovey’ became an unlikely dancefloor hit during the late 1980s, uniting Madonna’s forgotten no wave origins with the pop stardom of her later years. Sonic Youth’s rendition was, in part, a satirisation of her dominance of the singles charts throughout that decade, but it was also an ode to her early days.
“Nobody really knows about that part of her history,” Thurston Moore told The Guardian in 2018, talking about Madonna’s early connections to the no-wave scene that gave rise to Sonic Youth. “She was in a pre-Swans no wave band! There’s all that interconnected history in New York with Madonna and the no wave scene.”
With The Whitey Album, and ‘Into the Groovey’ in particular, Sonic Youth brought that forgotten, interconnected history to the forefront of their output. It might have been a no-expectations side project originally, but that dissonant cover of the pop smash remains a firm fan favourite among the kinds of Sonic Youth fans who would never be caught dead buying a Madonna album.
