Madonna, Sean, Palmer, Cage & Ringo
The Ciccone Youth Whitey Album at 35
It was apparently sometime in January of 1989 — thirty-five years ago this month — that one of the most bizarre ‘mainstream’ albums in Sonic Youth’s repertoire was released. I say apparently because it’s long been debated when exactly the record was actually issued, with some people insisting that it was as early as the spring of 1988. Furthermore, the band members themselves don’t seem to remember or at least acknowledge the actual release date. To obfuscate matters and increase the bizarre factor, it should be emphasised from the start that technically the record wasn’t even a Sonic Youth record.
I’m talking of course about The Whitey Album by Ciccone Youth.
Released by Enigma/Capitol in North America and Blast First in the UK, this most singular album found Sonic Youth — guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo, bassist Kim Gordon and drummer Steve Shelley — recording primarily electronic music with the help of an underground friend or two under a name that paid tribute to Madonna. In fact, the album came complete with two Madonna cover songs in the midst of all the eccentric madness.
As eccentric and singular as what such an album might sound like on paper, it was not a one-off, possessing a back-story of precursors going back almost three years.
As far as Sonic Youth were concerned, the story of The Whitey Album begins in March of 1986, during the sessions for their EVOL album at BC Studio in Brooklyn, when — with the help of a drum machine and some sampling equipment — the band recorded a cover of Madonna’s 1985 UK dance-pop single ‘Into the Groove’. They also recorded a brief (37-second) rap track, ‘Tuff Titty Rap’, which would come to serve as an intro to the Madonna cover. Also present during the EVOL sessions was Mike Watt of Minutemen fame, who contributed bass guitar to ‘In the Kingdom #19’ and a cover of Kim Fowley’s ‘Bubblegum’. Watt, who had been mourning the accidental death of guitarist D. Boon and the resultant dissolution of their band, was inspired to try his hand at a Madonna cover, too, and subsequently recorded a version of her 1983 dance hit ‘Burning Up’ at Radio Tokyo in Venice, California the following May. Complete with synthetic drumming by Ethan James and overdubbed lead guitar by Greg Ginn of Gone and Black Flag, the track — retitled ‘Burnin’ Up’ — was released as the A-side of a 7-inch single on the Minutemen’s New Alliance label in the late summer of ’86. Not surprisingly, ‘Tuff Titty Rap’ and ‘Into the Groove(y)’ served as the single’s B-side. These sides were flipped when a 12-inch version was released shortly after by Blast First in the UK. The front cover of both editions featured Kim Gordon’s blue and white treatment of a July/1985 New York Post front page bearing the headline ‘Madonna on Nude Pix: So What!’ (Gordon’s swapping of the original photo for a different one may have been an acknowledgement of Andy Warhol’s silkscreen print of the same front page the previous year.) The reverse of the 12-inch edition also featured comic-panel art by renowned SST cover artist (and Greg Ginn’s brother) Raymond Pettibon. All seven musicians were listed on the back cover of both versions without references to their associated bands, and both sides were credited to Ciccone Youth.
Ciccone, as most people knew by even 1986, is Madonna’s surname. Temporarily renaming one’s band in the pop star’s honour naturally entails a high level of interest and dedication. Sonic Youth began playing Madonna tracks out of a boom box onstage between their own numbers during the Bad Moon Rising tour of ’85. They even went so far as to give the EVOL track ‘Expressway to Your Skull’ the alternate titles ‘Madonna, Sean and Me’ and ‘The Crucifixion of Sean Penn’ on the album’s back cover and lyric sheet respectively. But why the sudden fascination with the singer and her music?
“In a way it was the first time that American radio was interesting again for me in a long time,” reminisced Lee Ranaldo in 1993, and I got into a lot of strange stuff at that point that was real radio music, like Madonna or Prince or Janet Jackson or Springsteen, and all of a sudden some of that stuff made sense in a certain way.” Ranaldo also insisted at the time that the band’s “fascination” with Madonna “was not ironic at all. It was only ironic in that we knew people would think it was ironic. But it was just true. We thought those songs were great. We bought those albums and listened to them the way we listen to a Dinosaur Jr. record.” (I Dreamed of Noise, Ignacio Julià and Jaime Gonzalo, 1994; p. 102)
“Madonna was actually in a couple of no-wave bands that nobody ever talks about,” Thurston Moore pointed out in an interview with The Guardian in 2018. “She was in a band [i.e., Spinal Root Gang] with these two twins, Dan and Josh Braun, who were the first members of Swans, Michael Gira’s band. Nobody really knows about that part of her history; 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. […]
“Eventually she started making really amazing dance records. ‘Into the Groove’ was brilliant to the point where I thought it would be a great song to cover through the prism of Sonic Youth. Instantly fabulous. We took her record and put it on one of the channels in the studio and we would fade it into [our version of] the song once in a while, not thinking about the legalities of such a move. […] We wanted to break down any kind of barrier that was being set up between the underground and the people who had graduated from it to the mainstream.
“We actually embraced Madonna’s joie de vivre, her celebrity. We did that record and everybody felt we were crazy, and some people lambasted us for giving her some kind of credibility in the underground. But she already had credibility, as far as I was concerned; she was already a part of the downtown scene. I don’t think she capitalised on it.” (‘Thurston Moore on Madonna: “She had credibility, she was really ahead of the game”’, as told to Kate Hutchinson, The Guardian; July15th, 2018)
No-wave roots and appreciation aside, the Ciccone Youth single may have had an inspirational predecessor: One cannot help but wonder if such an atypical project wasn’t inspired to a high degree by the cover of Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ that The Lords Of The New Church had issued as a single in 1985 and included on their IRS compilation Killer Lords later that same year. Reportedly recorded at the insistence of Miles Copeland of IRS Records, the track uncannily resembles the Ciccone Youth recordings in its sincerity tempered with deadpan mimicry.
Whatever the truth, the Ciccone Youth concept did by no means end in 1986. The next official use of the moniker occurred the following year, when the name was referenced along with an iteration of “tuff titty” in the lyrical context of ‘Master=Dik’ (“We’re Ciccone and that’s enough / I’m the royal tuff titty and you gotta taste my love”). This was another original rap number composed primarily of samples and synthetic drumming; in this case, also featuring an overdubbed lead guitar courtesy of J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. Recorded at Sear Sound along with the band’s Sister album in early ’87, the five-minute track would serve as the A-side of the EP — or ‘12” single’, as it’s called on the plain and grainy charcoal cover — Master=Dik / Beat on the Brat, usually referred to as simply Master=Dik (or Master-Dik, with a hyphen instead of an equal sign). (A ‘non-beatbox version’ of the number, featuring actual drums by Steve Shelley, was appended to the CD version of Sister.) Some sources state November 4th, 1987 as the record’s date of release on the SST label in the US. However, as Chris Lawrence has pointed out at the band’s official website, it was most likely released in late January of 1988 to coincide with its UK release on the Blast First label. This makes more sense in light of the fact that the record’s inner sleeve reprints a ranting Ben Weasel letter from Issue 54 of punk zine Maximumrocknroll, which had been published in November of ’87.
The record’s flipside consists of three other diverse and unusual tracks, beginning with a faithful rendition of The Ramones’ ‘Beat on the Brat’ that had been recorded at ‘Wharton’s Palace of Confusion’ (i.e., Wharton Tiers’s Fun City studio). This is followed by a six-part eleven-and-a-half-minute ‘sound collage’, consisting of an excerpt from a radio interview in Geneva on June18th, 1987 in which the band is questioned concerning their Scottish contemporaries (‘Under the Influence of The Jesus and Mary Chain’); a rather zany live takeoff on a Beatles hit — from the same Swiss radio show — intertwined with an impromptu take on the A-side’s track followed by faux shout-outs to several classic jazz musicians (‘Ticket to Ride / Master=Dik [Version] / Introducing the Stars’); someone (Dick Clark?) attempting to interview Ringo Starr in years gone by, Moore screaming his head off on stage amidst a clatter of drums, unidentified percussion with wind-like reverb, and a sample from Ranaldo’s bell and chime recordings (‘Ringo / He’s on Fire / Florida Oil Drums / Westminster Chimes’); a brief Far Eastern-style instrumental performed on suitably tuned guitars and percussion (‘Chinese Jam’); tremolo-inflected guitar with desolate and somewhat eerie overtones — not unlike that found in portions of the band’s 1986 Spinhead Sessions, a short chord progression played on acoustic guitar, and Moore’s repetitive chanting and impression of a beatbox (‘Vibrato / Guitar Lick / Funky Fresh’); and a musique concrète mash-up of electronic music and guitar-chord and ‘field’ samples (‘Our Backyard’). The record concludes with a five-second blast of staticky noise entitled ‘Traffik’.
This EP was reissued by the band’s own Goofin label on compact disc in March of 2008. The title was officially shortened to Master=Dik for this edition.
By the time Master=Dik / Beat on the Brat was being prepared for release in the early winter of 1987–88, sessions for the Ciccone Youth Whitey Album were well underway. Of course, as mentioned at the outset, it appears the record wouldn’t actually hit the stores until January of the following year — probably due to their American record company’s wishes that the more ‘traditional’ Daydream Nation be the band’s Enigma debut, in October. When it did, the listening public received a double dose of parody, for the album’s title suggested an ironic tribute to rival that inherent in the contrived band moniker and front-cover art.
The album’s front cover featured nothing but a black and white Xeroxed crop of Madonna’s face. (“We sent copies of the vinyl album to Warners to be passed on to Madonna via her sister who worked in the art department there. Word came back that she had no problem with it, acknowledging she remembered the band from her NYC Danceteria days.” — Daydream Nation [2007 Deluxe Edition], Ray Farrell’s liner notes.) ‘Ciccone Youth’ and the Whitey Album title were printed in small black letters on the otherwise plain-white back cover (the name and title are inverted on some early US pressings). The album’s title was an obvious takeoff on ‘The White Album’ — the common nickname given The Beatles’ 1968 self-titled double album.
According to popular legend, Sonic Youth had been promising to record their own version of the entire Beatles album for some time. In a mock ‘interview’ with the band in their Ciccone Youth personas for New Musical Express (NME) in September of ’88, Moore — or rather King Poopy D The Royal Tuff Titty — told Jack Barron, “Three years ago we said we were going to do ‘The White(y) Album’, and now we have” (‘Youth Programming [Bastards!]’, p. 13). However, any record of a band member having expressed such a desire has thus far eluded me. The closest thing to such a statement I could find is actually a quote from Creem magazine’s Dave Segal in the spring of 1986:
“Sonic Youth have ransacked the Stooges’ funhouse. They’ve basked in the Velvets’ white light / white heat. They’ve slaughtered Patti Smith’s horses. Soon they will paint the Beatles’ white album black — if they can ever learn the songs.”
Furthermore, just as the parodical Madonna concept may have found its initial inspiration in the Lords Of The New Church’s ‘Like a Virgin’ cover, the idea of covering an entire double album by The Beatles may have been inspired by Pussy Galore’s version of The Rolling Stones’ entire 1972 double album Exile on Main Street, released in cassette format on the band’s own Shove Records in December of 1986.
As alluded to in the aforementioned NME article, the title may also wryly comment on the idea of four (or five) Caucasian-Americans rapping and employing a beatbox in the mid to late 1980s.
The song titles and recording minutiae were all printed on the album’s inner sleeve (and the cassette’s j-card) along with the faint red outline of a sneaker sole print and a kitschy close-up of a woman’s bosom beneath a sequin-encrusted dress. Three further photos, including one of J. Mascis, were printed on the CD’s fold-out insert. Sonic Youth band members were listed under the aliases The Royal Tuff Titty (Moore), ss beat control (Shelley), The Sigh (Ranaldo) and Fly Fly Away (Gordon). To truly drive home the parody, fans wishing to contact Ciccone Youth were directed to write “c/o Sire Records” — Madonna’s label in the 1980s — at their New York address.
“Produced and directed” by Ciccone Youth themselves, the actual audio contents of The Whitey Album are an envelope-pushing exercise in unorthodoxy, even for a band of Sonic Youth’s calibre and pedigree. The fact that such an album was credited to a satirical alter-ego and released on the same label that carried the likes of Stryper and Poison is not exactly insignificant either.
The musical eccentricities of the record are only compounded by its tracks’ running order. It opens with the two-and-a-half-minute ‘Needle-Gun’, which fades in precariously and is the first of the album’s several sampler-assembled and beatbox-driven instrumentals — this one particularly reliant on percussive and atonal elements. Coming immediately and incongruously after, in the space quite often reserved for lead-off singles, is a little over a minute of silence — an open mic catching ‘sound bubbles’ in the style of avant-garde composer John Cage’s ‘4:33’. This is followed by ‘G-Force’, the album’s only new song as such. Amidst eerie ambience, mix-buried guitar improv and electronic beats, Gordon’s chanting emanates from two channels — one conveying the surreal main lyrics (e.g., “I don’t remember what it was like yesterday / Was there a yesterday? / G-force, $8.99 / $79.95 / The ice ballet, Sleeping Beauty”), and the other conveying glib ‘incidental’ lines reminiscent of those of Sister’s Beauty Lies in the Eye’ (e.g., “Sweetheart, come here”). This number’s underlying sampler and beatbox tracks actually serve as the basis for the next piece on the album. The instrumental ‘Platoon II’ is fundamentally the same number as ‘G-Force’, but with the guitar tracks and synthetic beats more prominent in the mix. Next is ‘MacBeth’, an upbeat funky rocker with layers of whirring guitar that is also the longest (5:28) of the album’s instrumentals. Contrastingly, the spoken-word section of a two-part piece follows. ‘Me & Jill’ features Steve Shelley taking his one and only turn at the Sonic/Ciccone Youth mic, reciting a Ranaldo narrative poem of surreal visions (“The cold silver sky opened for us, and we passed through. Last I saw of Jill she was heading backwards into the coils of the antennae, laughing, so beautiful.”). ‘Hendrix Cosby’, the second part of the piece, is a funky instrumental built upon a looped sample of Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles’s 1969 backing music for ‘Doriella Du Fontaine’, a spoken-word piece by The Last Poets’ Lightnin’ Rod (Jalal M. Nuriddin) released in 1984. Side one of the vinyl configuration concludes with Mike Watt’s take on ‘Burnin(g) Up’ — not the aforementioned version released on the 1986 single, but rather Watt’s original homemade demo recorded in May of the same year with the help of a drum machine.
The second side of the album opens with ‘Hi! Everybody’, a truly postmodern minute-long track that consists of a sped-up recording of Ranaldo welcoming all and sundry to the Ciccone Youth Whitey Album. Behind Ranaldo are samples from the ‘Goofy Mix’ of Sonic Youth’s cover of Saccharine Trust’s ‘I am Right’ (included on the SST Mini-Plot compilation CD from the previous year), as well as a sample of A Taste Of Honey’s 1978 disco hit ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’. Another two-part piece, ‘Children of Satan / Third Fig’, comes next; its first section consisting of seventeen seconds of synthesiser played back to front, and the second consisting of three minutes of instrumental guitar riffing and improv backed by a beatbox. The first half of the next piece, ‘Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu’, consists primarily of its namesake: Gordon and the band’s lighting designer Susanne Sasic discussing the pros and cons of managing bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Redd Kross while Neu!’s ‘Negativland’ (1972) plays in the background. Following Gordon’s attempt to phone up Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis, the second half ensues with some loud grungy guitar courtesy of Mascis himself before a looped sample of Whodini’s ‘Five Minutes of Funk’ (1984) overtakes it. This is followed by Gordon’s cover of Robert Palmer’s ‘Addicted to Love’, one of the album’s more popular numbers. Apparently it was recorded at a shopping mall’s karaoke booth, with Gordon singing along to a canned backing track. Coming next are ‘Moby-Dik’ (note the ‘Master-Dik’-style spelling and hyphenation) and ‘March of the Ciccone Robots’, two relatively brief sampler-based instrumentals — the latter also employing a drum machine. The penultimate track is actually a remake of ‘Making the Nature Scene’ from Sonic Youth’s 1983 album Confusion Is Sex. “Fragmentation is the rule / Unity is not taught in school” reaffirms Gordon poetically, this time backed with sampled guitars, a drum machine and even turntable scratching. The original vinyl configuration concludes with the ‘Tuff Titty Rap’ and the ‘Into the Groove(y)’ cover that were originally issued as the B-side of the 1986 Ciccone Youth single. An alternate mix of ‘MacBeth’ that features a more traditional hip-hop beat, known as ‘Steve’s Funky Dub’, served as an unlisted bonus track on the original CD edition.
The Whitey Album was issued on vinyl, CD and cassette by Blast First in the UK and by Enigma — a subsidiary of Capitol — in the US and Canada, making it technically their second North American major-label release. In Australia, where the album was released in association with the Au Go Go label, the initial pressing was mistakenly done with red and black cover art. According to discographer Rob Vaughn, the misprint was due to some mix-up involving the negative for the insert found in Rapeman’s 1988 LP Two Nuns And A Pack Mule (which, incidentally, includes a track entitled ‘Kim Gordon’s Panties’). The album was remastered for DGC/Geffen’s series of Sonic Youth CD and cassette reissues in 1995, and was remastered for an LP reissue on the band’s own Goofin label in 2006. The Goofin edition appends the CD bonus track to the end of side two.
There were no official singles released off of The Whitey Album. There was, however, a four-track 12-inch sampler entitled The Whitey Album Promo released by Blast First and Enigma to radio stations and the like in late 1988. This consisted of ‘Addicted to Love’, ‘Tuff Titty Rap’, ‘Into the Groove(y)’ and the original LP version of ‘MacBeth’. A CD version of the sampler substituted ‘Making the Nature Scene’ for ‘Tuff Titty Rap’, curiously.
Two official music videos would be released to promote the album. Both would be produced in the most unconventional of manners, not surprisingly. Not unlike the cover song itself, the ‘Addicted to Love’ video was made for twenty US dollars in a karaoke video booth. Gordon chose a military background for the shoot and wore Black Flag earrings. MTV refused to air the video on the grounds that it was too low-fi, despite Canada’s Much Music having no problem with adding it to their playlist. The ‘MacBeth’ video, on the other hand, came about in a back-to-front sort of way, when punk director Dave Markey used the instrumental as the soundtrack for his 1980 short film Plasticland before including it in his Some Shit VHS compilation in 1988. Markey would later add leftover footage from his shoot of Sonic Youth’s ‘Mildred Pierce’ video in 1990, and the resultant video was included on the band’s 1995 Screaming Fields of Sonic Love VHS and laser disc compilation.
One other track from the Whitey Album sessions, a rather minimalist two-minute sampler/beatbox instrumental known as ‘****’, was released in 1989 on both the Blast First Nothing Short of Total War anthology LP and the similar Devil’s Jukebox 7-inch box set.
Even more unique and peculiar was a 7-inch single that was issued by Moore’s Ecstatic Peace label sometime in 1991. Credited to Lucky Sperms (a name most likely lifted from an early-’80s Daniel Johnston painting) and sometimes referred to as The Man after Raymond Pettibon’s front-cover art, the single features Mike Watt and Steve Shelley covering Daniel Johnston’s ‘Walking the Cow’ on the A-side and Watt, Shelley, Ranaldo and Gordon performing a medley of The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘Glass Onion’ on the flipside. Moore is credited with “nada” on the record’s sleeve, and Watt does the vocal on both tracks — that on the medley electronically slowed down. The Watt-led session was recorded at Wharton Tiers’s Fun City studio on the 19th of January, 1987; and the extreme retooling of two Beatles numbers may suggest some move towards an intended ‘White Album’ parody. So this might be best considered yet another product of the Ciccone alter-ego mindset — to date, the last to receive an official release.
Sadly, in the decade and a half since the band’s Whitey Album and Master=Dik Goofin reissues, there have been rather little interest shown the Ciccone Youth persona on the part of fans, the media or Sonic Youth themselves. The reasons behind this aren’t exactly clear, but one can make reasonable guesses.
In many ways, the adopting of alter-egos and the mish-mashing (or miss-matching) of musical styles were the ultimate in alternative endeavours where 1980s rock and pop were concerned. Such practices may have also directly informed and inspired much of what we look back upon today as the ’90s ‘alt-rock era’. However, by the mid 1990s every other major star or cult figure in rock music was being celebrated with a ‘tribute’ album of cover songs by musicians of every style and sub-genre; and by the end of the decade even the likes of Garth Brooks was recording — and cashing in — under the guise of an alter-ego. As a result, noisy indie rockers adopting Madonna’s surname and recording quirky pop covers no longer seemed like such a significant (or lucrative) event.
It should also be pointed out that the Material Girl herself, Madonna, is no longer the major player and household name that she was in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially where the music-buying youth market is concerned. A reformed Sonic Youth or any band wishing to adopt an alter-ego in this day and age would be best advised to assume a persona of Lady Youth or Sonic Swift.
The band’s own reluctance to revisit and further capitalise on the persona might also have something to do with contemporary concerns over copyright infringements — especially in light of past legal threats stemming from Sister’s photo-collage album cover in 1987. “We took bass drums off LL Cool J records and Run DMC records,” Moore stated in the notorious NME ‘interview’ in 1988 (p. 54). “We took stuff off Jimi Hendrix and, well, what are they going to do? Beat us up?” Probably not — but the solicitors representing them or their estates nowadays are likelier than ever to try and take you to the cleaners.
Personally, I’d like to see all the Ciccone Youth, Master=Dik and Lucky Sperms recordings released together in a deluxe 2-LP set — complete with the misprinted red and black Whitey Album front cover and the inverted black and white back cover. But I know better than to hold my breath.
For mostly logical reasons, the social and cultural climate in the US was changing by the end of 1989. And Sonic Youth — Ciccone alter-ego and all — were beginning to outgrow their dedicated but limited indie fan base. Their exclusivity threatened, the zealot-hipster fans were screaming betrayal. But it was time to move on. The majors and MTV were finally calling.
