round 1

(3) tiffany, “i think we’re alone now”
GOT AWAY FROM
(14) ciccone youth, “into the groovey”
228-98
AND WILL PLAY ON IN THE SECOND ROUND

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/6/22.

justin st. germain on tiffany’s “i think we’re alone now”

If I’d known that by the time I wrote this I’d have Covid, I would’ve picked a different song. Under the circumstances, “I Think We’re Alone Now” feels a little on the nose. You have to understand that I chose it last summer, when everyone was getting vaccinated and cases were down and there were no new variants and it seemed like it was almost over. Some things were, it turns out, but not Covid.
I’m writing from the pit of an Oregon winter, in the throes of Omicron, during what they’re calling the worst days of the pandemic. It’s been the worst days for weeks now. Yesterday I went to the county fairgrounds to get tested inside my car inside a barn, and today received my positive result. It did feel sort of positive, almost like an accomplishment—after all that waiting, all those times I thought my relationship stress or existential dread or seasonal allergies were Covid, I was finally right. I looked on the county website at this week’s orange bar, five times taller than any other, and found it oddly reassuring: at least I’m not alone. The feeling didn’t last.

*

Recently—yesterday, last week, who knows—the algorithm delivered a headline to my device. Our AI overlords have noticed how much I’ve been listening to “I Think We’re Alone Now”; I can’t look at a screen anymore without seeing ads for dating apps or boner pills or suicide hotlines. This link was, thankfully, more specific to my interests: Tiffany, née Tiffany Darwish, whose cover of this song is arguably the best-known version, was in the news.
She took “I Think We’re Alone Now” to number one in 1987, twenty years after the Tommy James original. Tiffany was sixteen at the time. She’s fifty now, and had recently taken the stage in some minor Florida burg to sing her biggest hit. The article linked to a video on TMZ. Such is the age in which we live.
The clip starts in the middle of the song. Tiffany seems lost, disoriented, possibly drunk, pretty much the way we all seem at this point. Her voice breaks and she forgets the lyrics, growls a few oh yeahs to stall. (Speaking of 1987, she sounds sort of like Macho Man Randy Savage.)
It’s sad. She’s all alone up there. Not literally—a dude on a stool strums a guitar, and a fiddle fires up offscreen during the chorus. But nobody came to see the fiddler. They came to hear Tiffany sing this song, and she can’t. Soon someone starts booing. She stops and points at them.
“Fuck you guys!” she yells.
Instantly, every time—and I’ve been watching this video a lot—I think: Yeah, fuck those guys!
“This is my hit!” she yells. “I’m going to sing it right!”
She tries her best, remembers and screams: running just as fast as we can. Holding on to one another’s hand. Trying to get away, into the night. And then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then we s— The clip cuts off mid-syllable, but you know the rest. You sang some of it right now, didn’t you? Or are you one of those people who lies about not liking this song?
Tiffany caught a lot of shit online about her performance, but I think it was perfect. To get up on stage in November of the worst year we can remember and totally botch a song about being alone, a song she didn’t want to sing in the first place thirty-five years ago, but now she’s stuck with it forever, because the song reminds us of a past we’re all half-delirious and desperate to return to. Tell me that wasn’t true, authentic, whatever people want from a performance. The fuck-you-guys fiddle version of “I Think We’re Alone Now” might be my favorite one, and that’s saying something, because everyone and their mother has covered this song.
A few days later, Tiffany posted an apology video to Instagram. She starts by singing the chorus again. She sounds better, the song re-recognizable, but you wonder why she’s doing it. To prove that she still can? Is she covering herself? What does that even mean? She says she had a panic attack, lost her voice: “I got up there and it just wasn’t there.” She appreciates the support. “I’m vulnerable,” she says, “and I’m human.”
You and me both, sister.

*

My chest constricts, I cough a lot, and my face hurts, but most of it’s mental: I feel dumb and unstable, keep forgetting why I walked into rooms and nearly falling over. I wear a mask around my house. I’m trying not to infect my wife, who’s packing boxes in the living room as I write this. I probably should’ve mentioned that I’m also getting divorced right now. If I’d known I’d be getting divorced, I would definitely not have picked this song.
I wasn’t going to write a personal essay. My thoughts on the genre have been documented. But have you ever been around someone who’s getting divorced? Not just divorced—a lot of them are happier—but getting there. Everything is personal; I lost it last week during an episode of BoJack Horseman. Still, that doesn’t mean it’s worth writing about. One of the first things you realize when you start getting divorced is that nobody gives a shit, just like you didn’t when all those other people you knew got divorced. Besides, the world is ending, divorce isn’t that big of a deal. For my parents, my soon-to-be-ex-wife’s parents, Tiffany’s parents, and all the other parents of the ’80s, divorce was like Omicron, everybody got it. My parents got divorced six times between them. Seven if you count theirs twice. Eight if you count the murder. If you think divorce is some kind of tragedy you’ve never seen one. But I have brain fog and a deadline, so here I am, writing about it.
As I frequently try to remind myself, divorce isn’t even all bad. Sure, it’s sad, and scary: all that emptiness ahead, the fear and loneliness and fear of loneliness. But being married sucked—that’s why we’re getting a divorce. I once heard a recently divorced acquaintance say that when someone says they’re getting one, you shouldn’t say you’re sorry, you should say congratulations. I never understood that until now. The calmness, the freedom, no more compromises or resentment or tension. It’s almost a relief that there doesn’t seem to be anyone around.
The tape dispenser screeches. I crank up the volume and try to focus. A while back I made a playlist filled with like thirty different versions of “I Think We’re Alone Now”—there are more, I just gave up—which I’ve now been listening to for a solid month, as its title has gotten truer and truer. I’ve been trying to figure out why people don’t like it.
For example, when I picked this song back in those halcyon days of August, our friendly tournamentmongers responded: oh god, really? Tiffany? They’re not alone in that sentiment: the single currently has a 2.8/5 on rateyourmusic.com, and last year, as part of a series reviewing every number-one hit ever, Stereogum gave Tiffany’s version of the song a 5/10, saying: “it’s a perfectly digestible pop product, but it never sounds like anyone’s world exploding.” I beg to differ—right now, it sounds exactly like my world exploding.
Which brings me to a question I’ve been asking perhaps too often lately, in a variety of contexts: am I wrong here? Because I want to be clear about this, and communicate my honest feelings in the way I’ve been told I often fail to: I fucking love this song. I didn’t pick it ironically or cleverly or for some contrarian reason, or even because I thought it could win. (Although I do—I think it should.) I just love it. Especially now. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, but what does anymore? Every time I hear “I Think We’re Alone Now,” any old version, even the shitty ones, it makes me happy. Well, happier. I catch myself singing it all the time. I don’t dance as a policy—it looks like I’m being defibrillated—but sometimes when Tiffany’s version comes on in my headphones I find myself trying to imitate that heel-intensive thing she does in the video, in my kitchen, with limited success. This last month, as I’ve been listening on repeat, it’s become one of my favorite songs.
So I’m trying to be empathetic or whatever, and understand why so many people are so wrong about this song. I guess the lyrics—penned by cover-song savant Ritchie Cordell, who also wrote “Mony Mony” and produced Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock n’ Roll”—don’t make a lot of sense. Even the title is full of contradictions. Wouldn’t you know whether you were alone? If someone is saying all that stuff, how could the beating of their hearts be the only sound? Can you even be alone together? Actually, don’t answer that: the tape dispenser just did.
The track itself doesn’t help. Tommy James had a whole band, the fungible Shondells: backup singers, drums, guitars, a tambourine, possibly a marimba there at the end. His producer included that deeply strange but technically innovative sample of crickets. The original has texture. Tiffany’s version seems to be her and a Casio keyboard; its most innovative gesture is a synth solo.
Mr. James could be another factor. It seems like people don’t give him enough credit. Is it because his first hit, “Hanky Panky,” was a cover? Or because he’s been covered so much? (This tourney includes two Tommy James covers, and could’ve easily had a third, Billy Idol’s “Mony Mony.”) Is that why he doesn’t get the respect he deserves? James had two number-one hits—not including “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which reached #1 on some lists, but not Billboard’s—and released eight studio albums in the span of four years, charting a whole artistic evolution from bubblegum pop to psychedelic rock; Crimson & Clover is a stone-cold classic. He helped pioneer the concept of a music video by making a short film for “Mony Mony” fifteen years before MTV existed. He’s been touring steadily for sixty years. He once dosed a presidential candidate with amphetamines on the campaign trail. He was so mobbed up in the ’70s that he had to flee New York so he didn’t wind up with concrete shoes. One time before a concert he got so high that he collapsed and was pronounced dead onstage; fifty years later, he put out an album called Alive. That guy is punk as fuck.
Then there’s Tiffany, whom people also underestimate, for reasons that are more apparent: young, female, pretty, most famous for a cover song. You don’t hear so much the story of a child prodigy who started performing in clubs at the age of ten, killed Star Search at fourteen, and recorded her first album a year later, the self-titled one that would soon top the charts, making her the youngest female artist ever to do so. Nobody talks about how she had two number-one hits: “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which wasn’t even supposed to be a single, and the ballad “Could’ve Been.” Or that she’s released ten more albums since, voiced Judy in the Jetsons movie, has a handful of other film and TV credits—and sure, Mega Piranha isn’t exactly Citizen Kane, but she got top billing, and how many movies have you been in? She has an active fan club, tens of thousands of followers, more than a million monthly listeners on Spotify. Thirty-five years after this song came out, she’s still one-name famous.
Maybe it’s the video? I should probably talk about the video. Four and a half minutes of pure, uncut 1987. Teenaged Tiffany dances alone in stonewashed jeans by some train tracks, then hangs out the window of a moving car like people did back in that gloriously unsafe era. The synth solo hits, and she does her signature dance. Gumby makes a cameo. God, I love this video. Most of it takes place in a mall in Ogden. A mall in Ogden! That tells you everything you need to know about 1987: a teen pop star could film the music video for a number-one song in a mall in Ogden. Tiffany’s manager sent her on a nationwide tour of malls to promote her album, and back then, that worked. “I Think We’re Alone Now” shot to number one mostly because of malls. Is that why people don’t respect it? Do you have something against malls?
If you still have a mall nearby, like an honest to god food-court-and-atria mall, you should go before it’s gone. Until I got Covid, et cetera, one of my plans for this essay was to go hang out in a mall all day and see what happened. There is no better place to meditate about how much has changed since this video came out, the death drive of consumer capitalism and social media’s fragmenting of our shared reality blah blah blah. A mall used to be the kind of place Tiffany could pack so full of fans that a bunch of bros in tank tops had to hold them back, as they do somewhat unconvincingly in the video. Now they’re the loneliest places in America.

*

Nobody wants to read about the pandemic anymore, but it’s relevant: “I Think We’re Alone Now” has become a pandemic anthem. A few weeks into the first lockdowns, Billie Joe Armstrong, the lead singer of Green Day, recorded a cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and posted it to YouTube, along with the following note: I figure if we have to spend this time in isolation at least we can be alone together. (Remember that? When we were all going to be alone together?) He sang it again a week later on The Tonight Show, then released another version with his kids on drums and bass. Half a dozen other bands have released cover versions since the pandemic started, and someone made an 8-track sorta-cover that’s better than it has any reason to be.
Like everything else, this song has changed in the last two years. At first, “I Think We’re Alone Now” was clearly about sex: we all know what they’re tumbling to the ground for. Children, behave? Watch how you play? Those kids are totally fucking. But the meaning of art changes according to context. I could quote Roland Barthes or something, but it’s pretty obvious: everyone’s singing this song now because the pandemic has made us lonely. In an interview about Billie Joe’s cover of her cover, Tiffany said as much: “There are people out there that need a little pick-me-up.” This song might have been about sex in 1987, but now it’s about loneliness.
One of the interesting things about this song is that its two best-known performers can’t stop singing it, either. Tommy James has made at least three different versions, not including his minor hit “Mirage,” which according to legend—more specifically, a really old and disreputable-looking website—contains the same chord progression as “I Think We’re Alone Now,” only in reverse, the result of him accidentally playing it backward during a songwriting session. He also cut his own pandemic version: his 2020 album, the aforementioned Alive, includes an acoustic cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now.”
Tiffany has done at least four different versions, as far as I can tell, and possibly hundreds; Spotify lists 213 versions performed by her. This song has been in so many movies and TV shows and 80s compilations, not to mention re-covers and re-mixes, that it’s impossible to say which ones should be considered independent versions. There’s probably some profound essayistic observation to be made about that, quoting Baudrillard or Benjamin or some shit, but give me a break here.
Her latest recording was in 2019, so wasn’t technically a pandemic version, but it is about loneliness. It’s longer, more rock than pop, and Tiffany’s voice is husky, soulful, more mature. A portrait of the artist as a grown woman. She was getting divorced at the time. That’s not my business. I’m only mentioning it here because she discussed it publicly in interviews, and because I wonder how much getting divorced informed her decision to record this song again. Maybe I’m projecting.
It certainly shows up in her other recent songs. A few months into the pandemic, Tiffany released an EP of acoustic self-covers, Pieces of Me Unplugged. My favorite, “Starting Over,” begins with the lyric: I wish that I could just be free / from the loneliness in me.

*

The good news about being alone is that you get used to it. That’s also the bad news. I’ve been alone a lot. I was the son of a single mother who worked, and I grew up on the outskirts of a pissant town in rural Arizona where I was frequently the only human in sight. And I read and write, both of which involve a lot of time alone pretending that you’re not. When the pandemic started, my wife and I joked that I’d been preparing for it all my life. Turns out it wasn’t so funny. Soon we were lonely together.
Now, in my first days of being alone again, it sometimes feels lonely and sometimes feels natural, inevitable, the way it is. Nothing lasts forever: someone leaves or someone dies. That’s why so many people are lonely. Nobody admits it, not out loud, not in a conversation. But search for loneliness on Spotify, read the lyrics:

Look at all the lonely people.

At my window, sad and lonely.

I’ve got my own loneliness.

Can’t get away from loneliness.

Loneliness is the worst thing in the world.

Loneliness is something I can’t endure.

I think we’re alone now.

*

There are at least three movies called “I Think We’re Alone Now.” One came out during the pandemic, a slasher film I didn’t bother to watch; in the trailer, Tiffany’s version of the song plays over a gratuitous tableau of a murdered woman. Another one came out before the pandemic but is about a pandemic. Tyriann Lannister lives alone in a library by a lake after everyone dies in some kind of plague. Nobody talks for the first twenty minutes. It doesn’t include the song.
The third one does. A documentary from 2008—which somehow looks much longer ago than 1987 does—it follows two people who are obsessed with Tiffany. One of them might be the most sympathetic stalker ever portrayed on film, and the other radiates so much pain and loneliness it hurts to see, even with a screen. Together they go to Vegas to see Tiffany live. After the concert, they take pictures with their idol, and that night, in their hotel room, these two broken people inflate that interaction until they’re arguing over who’s better friends with Tiffany. The next morning they go back to their grim little apartments far away. It’s a great documentary, smart and subtle, with a sophisticated approach to portrayal, a complicated aesthetic and ethic. It’s the loneliest movie I’ve ever seen.

*

I once spent a week alone in Belgium, touring breweries and battlefields and researching a novel I was writing as far as the IRS was concerned. I went because I was lonely at the time, the last of my book money was burning a hole, and I’d been listening to the Camera Obscura song “Let’s Get Out of This Country” so much that finally I said to myself: let’s.
So I flew into Brussels, rented a Nissan, and drove out to the German border, to a hamlet called Winterspelt that the German writer Alfred Andersch once named a novel after. It’s about a German officer near the end of World War II who wants to surrender. Well, that’s the plot—I don’t really remember, but want to say it was about loneliness. Andersch was a German deserter himself, and he spent time in both Dachau and American POW camps, so he knew a thing or two about the subject. I liked his book. My war novel was sort of a homage, although I never actually wrote it.
I did spend a night in Winterspelt, in a German bed and breakfast I’d booked online, where nobody spoke any English except for the owner’s teenaged son, who showed me to my room and asked why I was there and ended our conversation rather quickly after I said to see where Americans died in the war. It was hard to sleep in all that German quiet, and the next day, after a breakfast of sliced cheese and unnerving sausage, I returned for good to the Belgian side of the border.
In Bastogne, where Americans died in the war, I went to museums and war memorials and a brewery or two alone, drawing glances and stares and the occasional polite inquiry in languages I didn’t speak. One day I drove out into the Ardennes to find some battlefield I’d read about online, and after I got lost on a switchbacked forest road, the GPS announced I’d entered Luxembourg—lonely, neutral Luxembourg—which I must have left at some point, imperceptibly, because soon enough I was back in Belgium, at my destination, a museum in a barn beside a field where an Army platoon was ambushed during some peripheral skirmish of the Battle of the Bulge.
I parked and followed signs down a path blazed through a field of shoulder-high grass, probably barley, for all the beer. As I groped through the gloam the signs petered out, and in the fading light I couldn’t read the garbled English on the pamphlet. But I didn’t need to be told what had happened or where. There are benefits to being alone. Soon I found myself pulled like a witcher’s stick to the spot where the ambush happened, a clearing where I just knew. I stood there, staring into the dark treeline, imagining an enemy out there in the forest, waiting for the terror to descend before they started shooting. It was the loneliest place I’ve ever been.

*

This is going off the rails. Nobody cares about my divorce or the pandemic, and why the hell am I writing about Belgium? I should’ve picked Limp Bizkit. This is due tomorrow, but it’s just not there.
Fuck you guys. It’s my essay.

*

Today we went down to the courthouse and sat knee-to-knee in a cubicle as a clerk slid forms through a hole in the plexiglass and we signed them one after another, cracking jokes, trying to keep it light and quick. Behind the clerk, above her desk, hung a sign with one of those quirky office slogans, something about the beach. There isn’t a real beach in five hundred miles, nowhere you’d want to swim or drink a margarita, just the cold and lonely places people around here call beaches, all dead kelp and outcrops. That’s not fair—there’s a nice one about an hour west of here, a halfway secret you have to hike down stairs to get to, where a big rock out in the water makes for a nice sunset. That’s where we got married.
Ten years together, over in ten minutes. The clerk said we’d get the papers in a week, depending on the mail, and wished us luck. It was freezing outside. We gave each other one last married hug and walked away. In the car, while I was Venmoing my half of the divorce fee—in the note field, emojis of a husband, a wife, a skull and crossbones—my phone’s Bluetooth connected, and guess what song came on. The original. Tommy James. Crickets.

Justin St. Germain wrote the memoir Son of a Gun and the book-length essay Bookmarked: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. He dressed a lot better back in '87.

Rhythm of Ciccone / Some Youths Get Into the Groovey: Beanbag Amerika on ciccone youth

1983 saw the release of Madonna’s debut solo album Madonna—recorded with major label money at Joe Tarsia’s state-of-the-art Sigma Sound New York—and of Sonic Youth’s debut full-length Confusion is Sex [*1]—recorded in a makeshift studio in the basement of the Chelsea apartment building where sound engineer Wharton Tiers worked as the super. That summer, when I took the crisp $20 bill out of a birthday card from my grandmother to the music department at Sears, I was almost certainly presented with the option of buying the former, while most likely not the latter. But instead of either, I started myself down the path of record collecting by picking out a different debut release, Men Without Hats’s Rhythm of Youth.
I was 8 years old and intrigued by the absurdly non-sequitur “no hats” logo in boldly graphic primary colors. Rhythm of Youth had made a splash in the band’s native Canada the previous year, but was freshly released south of the border and yet to blow up on the back of the runaway success of its second single, “The Safety Dance.” Men Without Hats are not a one-hit-wonder, exactly. Over the last four decades, frontman Ivan Doroschuk and a rotating cast of friends, relatives, and session musicians have released eight studio albums and a handful of EPs. Though, it’s true that the rest of that catalog remains eclipsed by “The Safety Dance.” [*2]
The narrator of “The Safety Dance” is a bit of a jerk. We can leave your friends behind, he sings, because your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance, well, they’re no friends of mine. But, at the same time, he’s so joyously optimistic about the power of dance, that we kind of forgive him. And the song is catchy and optimistic. Its continued success is unsurprising. It was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2020, and the band released an updated self-cover last fall, retitled “No Friends of Mine.” [*3]
Doroschuk has maintained in interviews that the song is not about sex, safe or otherwise. [*4] Sometimes dancing is just dancing, whatever the parents from that town in Footloose might think. Sometimes, however, the cigar is most definitely a penis, and while she was writing “Into the Groove,” Madonna was thinking all sorts of lascivious thoughts about the young Latin man smoking on the fire escape across the street from her Alphabet City walk-up. At night, I lock the doors, where no one else can see, she sings. I’m tired of dancing here all by myself. Tonight, I wanna dance with someone else.
Having burnt through a brief tryst with the object of these affections by the time a demo had been recorded, Madonna intended to pass the song on to Mark Kamins (the club DJ who had helped launch her career) for up-and-coming R&B singer Cheyene. Do you remember Cheyene? Me neither. I must have heard her cover of Prince’s “Private Joy” numerous times, as it featured in the film Weird Science—a staple of weekend basic cable programming in my teens—(though the only music from the film that’s still rattling around my skull is Oingo Boingo’s title track). Her only hit, a cover of Italian disco band Answering Service’s “Call Me Mr. Telephone,” sounds vaguely familiar, though it may just be endemic of the era. Would we remember Cheyene if she had recorded “Into the Groove?” Would we remember “Into the Groove?”
As it transpired, Madonna was making her acting star turn in Desperately Seeking Susan at the time, and while she was working on a new song for the film, that was scrapped, and “Into the Groove” was substituted. Kamins was furious, Cheyene faded into obscurity. The demo was used as-is in the film, in a club scene filmed at Danceteria. Madonna set to work on a more polished version, which (until a number of years later) was only released domestically on the B-side of the extended remix of the Like a Virgin single “Angel.” I’d like to imagine that it’s this 12” dance remix that ended up in too-cool-for-school, prematurely-jaded punk rocker Thurston Moore’s record collection.
Thurston Joseph Moore and Madonna Louise Ciccone were born three weeks and 1200 miles apart in the summer of 1958. In the late ’70s they both dropped out of college and moved to New York City. They both played in bands and came to prominence in the fractured, post-disco club scene. They most likely had friends in common, though they walked different paths. Madonna went mainstream, Thurston stayed underground. Madonna dated producers and DJs, the graffiti artist and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, and eventually actor Sean Penn.[*5] Turston met Kim Gordon and they became the preeminent power couple of post-punk (until their divorce and consequent dissolution of Sonic Youth in 2011).
In March of 1986, during the sessions for EVOL at Martin Bisi’s legendary BC Studios in Gowanus, Sonic Youth recorded a cover of “Into the Groove.” On its face it seems an amateurish effort, stumbling the line between cover version, karaoke rendition, and remix. New vocals and instrumentation are layered over the original. (This is the method by which I—truly an amateur—recorded a cover of the Soul Coughing song “True Dreams of Wichita” on a Tascam 4-track in my Austin, Texas bedroom in 1999.[*6])
A common refrain in stories about Sonic Youth is the implication that they never learned to correctly play or properly maintain their instruments, simply feeling their own way on their increasingly mistuned guitars to make the sort of sounds that they wanted to make. It’s the type of statement that rings true and gets repeated to the point where it is taken as prima facie fact. It is however, I suspect, at its most innocuous an exaggeration or self-depreciating deflection. Less generously, an affectation of hipster naiveté and glorification of willful ignorance. EVOL is a raw album certainly, its parts occasionally banging up against one another or getting lost in the miasma. But it also reads as the work of a band coming into an assured maturity, aware that they are beginning to mold around themselves a place in the unfolding history of alternative rock. And it’s from within this context that “Into the Groovey” [*7] came to be.
Possibly intended for a Madonna tribute album that never materialized, “Into the Groovey” and Mike Watt’s cover of “Burnin’ Up” were first released on a double A-side 7”, both cheekily attributed to Ciccone Youth, after Madonna’s abandoned surname.
Sonic Youth’s side has a lead-in of 30 seconds of Thurston freestyling over a default drum machine beat, titled “Tuff Titty Rap.” Fuck yeah! he yells twice, echoing into a moment of static, then Kim’s driving bassline kicks in, laying a path along which the other Youths—Thurston, guitarist Lee Renaldo, and the band’s new (fourth and final) drummer, 20-year-old Steve Shelley—play. Not just play as in play their instruments, but like hop, skip, and jump play. Like kids in the park. Like dance, in a post-modern, Merce Cunningham sort of way. In typical SY-style, this does involve playing guitars through a nest of daisy-chained effects pedals. But also, in an embrace/appropriation/perversion of pop sensibilities, involves a lot of noodling with synthesizers and drum machines. Syncopated 808 snares and claps. A repeated ping-pong motif that sounds vaguely Middle Eastern and reminds me of an early Cure track that I haven’t been able to place. Madonna’s original recording surfaces from time to time, sometimes on her own, sometimes in duet with Thurston’s (dis)affected vocals.
Thurston muddles through the lyrics in the way that you do when you choose a karaoke song that you’re absolutely sure you definitely know all the words to. Swallowing missteps, occasionally making things up, going hard on the chorus. His narrator is not particularly interested in seducing the boy across the way, but may be warming up to the idea that pop music might not be as vacuous as he’d heretofore taken it to be.
Sonic Youth continued to play around in this vein and released a full-length album as Ciccone Youth in 1988. The Whitey Album is part ode to Madonna (the cover art is a blown-out, super close-up of her face, focused on her iconic beauty mark), part practical joke, part conceptual cover of the Beatles’ White Album. It’s also very much a template for the band’s later, more “serious,” SYR series of self-released experiments. It features the single versions of “Tuff Titty Rap”/“Into the Groovey,” a pared down version of Watt’s “Burnin’ Up,” song sketches, spoken word passages, a karaoke cover of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” synthesizer experiments, skits, one minute of silence, like a radio-edit of John Cage’s “4:33.”
In 1989 Sonic Youth signed a deal with Geffen Records, and in 1990 released Goo on the new DGC imprint—future major label home of alternative rock in general, and Nirvana very specifically. Now 15 years old, I had yet to be exposed to Sonic Youth. Madonna was of course omnipresent, but I was too cool for all that. I was precociously ahead of the curve on Nirvana. I bought their debut album, Bleach, at a record store in Greenfield, Massachusetts because of the stark black & white photonegative on the sleeve: the band rocking out, their long hair obscuring their faces, spoke to my teen angst. Then came Nevermind. Sonic Youth—already at this point established alt-rock titans—rode the wave of grunge into the mainstream, and into my record collection. They released the Butch Vig-produced Dirty in 1992. I bought that, and Goo, and all of the albums through their early career masterpiece Daydream Nation. All except one.
I wouldn’t hear “Into the Groovey” until DGC re-released The Whitey Album in 1995. Surprisingly, given issues of questionable copyright, of Madonna’s face right there on the cover, it was released as-is. I’m not sure where I bought it, or even why. I don’t think I would have known of its existence. The web was still in its infancy. Though I had subscriptions to Rolling Stone and then SPIN and then Alternative Press through my teens, I doubt it’s the sort of document that the music press would have spilt much ink on, especially years after its initial release. Wherever I picked it up, it must have been filed under Sonic Youth. [*8] I don’t recall the circumstances of listening to it. It wasn’t life-changing or mind-expanding. It wasn’t revelatory.
But, something about it stuck with me. Listening to it again, I can feel myself in my own 20-year-old hipster brain, the college drop-out who would eventually move to Brooklyn. [*9] Inside those four and a half minutes of Thurston drolly mumbling his way through Madonna’s lyrics, amongst the guitar noise and the clicks and bleeps, is a portrait of your friend who don’t dance—of myself, despite also being the 8 year old bopping along to “The Safety Dance” and the Footloose soundtrack, the 17 year old discovering Sonic Youth and slyly taking a modern dance class—finding the rhythm. Getting into the groove(y). [*10] 

1. The band considers their 1982 self-titled release an album proper, but with only five tracks and clocking less than 25 minutes, most other sources classify it as an EP.

2. They’ve had one other single hit the Billboard Top-40, 1987’s “Pop Goes the World.”

3. Men Without Hats released a covers EP last fall just as I began thinking about this essay. Their reimagined self-cover Is great.

4. Doroschuk says the song is about “pogo dancing,” the precursor to moshing, in which—as is probably clear form the name—the dancer jumps rigidly up and down, often quite violently. In an odd bit of synchronicity, the message “Don’t be afraid to pogo, don’t be afraid to relate” is etched into the runout groove of the original Ciccone Youth vinyl single.

5. Something about Madonna’s relationship with Sean Penn captivated Sonic Youth. An early gig poster, reproduced in the liner notes to the CD release of their self-titled first EP, reads simply “Sonic Youth / Peppermint Lounge • Friday 15” over a tabloid newspaper clipping of Madonna and Sean. On EVOL, their song “Expressway to Yr. Skull” is alternately titled “Madonna, Sean and Me” and “The Crucifixion of Sean Penn.” And the sleeve art of the original Ciccone Youth single, while credited to Kim, is a cyanographic reproduction of Andy Warhol’s screenprint reproduction of the New York Post front page story “Madonna on Nude Pix: So What!” though with a different photo of Madonna and Sean inserted.

6. The original tape was probably lost in a move, and I think the only digitized copy existed on a clunky external hard drive that I left with some other odds and ends in the back of a closet in an ex-girlfriend’s parent’s house.

7. The song is variously titled “Into the Groovy,” “Into the Groovey,” and “Into the Groove(y)” on different releases, though they are all the same recording.

8. When I dug through my binders full of old CDs for my copy in preparation for writing this essay, I found it in the ’C’s, between the Cure’s Pornography and a Cranberries bootleg.

9. I wouldn’t move to Brooklyn until after going back to, and finishing college. I guess I wasn’t quite as cool as all that.

10. Addendum: If in fact your friends don’t dance, don’t attempt to encourage them to do so in the cartoonishly old-west style of shooting at their feet and yelling “Dance!,” as rapper Tory Lanez allegedly did to Megan Thee Stallion, a story that I learned of while researching this essay. While Madonna reportedly thought SY’s “Into the Groovey” was all in good fun, she has not been as laid back about Lanez lifting the same melody for a recently released single, and stories about this have invariably mentioned the shooting incident.

Bean (n): An edible, kidney-shaped seed, borne in the long pods of a leguminous plant. / Bean is an occasional poet, non-practicing architect, and children’s librarian. He resides in NYC, and despite what you may have heard, is not actually from Antarctica. His heart is covered in paisleys. He enjoys bright colors, long novels, boardgames & crossword puzzles, and the company of rabbits. He recently became a father to two tiny humans.