In 1989, the New York experimental rock band Sonic Youth decided to put together a kind of tribute to Madonna. With the name Ciccone Youth he created The whitey album, a jagged and dissonant work, made up of rudimentary samplings, drum machines, feedback and improvisation. In the midst of that sonic chaos, two of Madonna’s songs emerged, clearly recognizable: Into the groove – entitled Into the groove(y) – e Burnin’ up – changed to Burning up. The two pieces, the first an international hit and the second one of his first singles, were treated with a certain respect by Sonic Youth: most of the rock press saw in that operation a mockery, a mockery of the pop star of plastic that was dominating the world. The hard and pure rock press has always been happy when it can point to the public mockery of a successful artist dismissing him as bogus and “created at the table”. An expression, the latter, which to my old poppettaro ears has always seemed a compliment: if something has been “created at the table” it means that there is some thought behind it.
On the occasion of Madonna’s 60th birthday in 2018, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore denied that their old, scrawled Madonna covers were a mockery. In an interview with the Guardian he said, “We sincerely embraced the joy of living of Madonna and her celebrity. We did those covers and people thought we were crazy, some even accused us of giving them some kind of credibility in the underground. But she already had her credibility; she was already genuinely part of the New York scene, she didn’t take advantage of anything ”.
Sonic Youth in 1989 therefore saw something in Madonna’s songs that few at the time could guess: under the pop envelope they felt a roughness, an urgency that they somehow associated with the New York no wave scene from which they came. In Whitey album Sonic Youth took two Madonna songs and treated them as one ready made Duchampian: especially listening to their version of Into the groove it is evident that they were drawing the mustache on the Mona Lisa.
In 1989 Madonna had only a five-year career behind her: she was very famous, but many thought that her parable would end soon. Fast forward to 2021: Madonna at 64 is what in the discography defines herself as a “legacy artist”, that is an artist with an important repertoire and ready for museumization. Tackling her songs with an underground spirit today is a very different undertaking: Madonna is much more cumbersome than she was in 1989 and above all she has changed sound a thousand times; dedicating a tribute to her today means making a choice, grasping a precise angle and imposing a unitary point of view on her production made up of memorable moments and equally memorable missteps.
If there is one thing that the Texan musician and producer Johnny Jewel has very clear, bordering on compulsive obsession, it is the aesthetic question. In the mid-nineties, starting from a fascination for the New York no wave sound (the same sound that gave rise to Sonic Youth) Johnny Jewel formed his first band, Glass Candy, and his sound soon evolved into a suspended hybrid between italo disco and synth pop. With his second band, the Chromatics, he further focuses the formula: vintage synthesizers, echoes and reverberations for ambitious and spacious music capable of alternating moments of absolute emptiness and vacuous horror. Listening to the Chromatics records it seems to inhabit a non-place out of time (a bit like the motionless eighties soundscapes imagined by the vaporwave) in which, however, something could happen at any moment.
In 2006 Johnny Jewel founded his own label, based in both Portland and Los Angeles, and called it Italians Do It Better (“Italians do it better”). The name is an oblique tribute to Madonna, who in 1986, in the video of Papa don’t preach, he wore a T-shirt with that written on it. Italians Do It Better, at the beginning, only releases Johnny Jewel albums in his various incarnations, including that of author of soundtracks of real or fictional films. In 2011 he wrote and produced, together with the composer Cliff Martinez, the music for Drive, Nicolas Winding Refn’s thriller starring Ryan Gosling as a taciturn Hollywood mechanic and stuntman full of secrets. Over time the label began to release other artists, but all of them seemed to be some sort of emanation of Johnny Jewel and his world.
A targeted tribute
Italians Do It Better, a compilation of twenty covers of Madonna released in 2021, is first and foremost a celebration of Johnny Jewel’s sound, aesthetics and vision, and is to all intents and purposes considered his album rather than a collection. Her direction begins with the choice of the pieces: thirteen songs come from the full-bodied Madonnesque production of the eighties, the others are carefully chosen from her more electronic albums (Confessions on a dancefloor, American life, Music e Ray of light). Its rnb and urban phase is completely missing: even solid pieces like Rain, Take a bow e Human nature they are completely ignored. It appears only from that period Justify my love, a 1990 piece written and co-produced by Lenny Kravitz that actually acted as a hinge between the Madonna of the eighties and that of the nineties. Australian keyboardist and saxophonist Jorja Chalmers distorts the sound of her sax and her voice to take what was a vaguely soft porn trip hop tune into another dimension.
The modus operandi of the artists of the Italians Do It Better it is always the same in all twenty tracks of the album: they choose a Madonna piece, isolate a couple of elements (a loop, a bass line, a synth arpeggio, a vocal melody), slow it down and blast it between reverberations, echoes and layers of sound. The Belarusian band Dlina Volny (“wavelength”) takes a robust electroclash piece like Hollywood (from the mistreated album American life 2003) and transforms it into something that the first Ladytrons could have conceived. In depriving the piece of all its pop elements, Dlina Volny make an almost philological operation, reporting Hollywood to its electro roots.
Even more radical are the Canadians In Mirrors they choose I’m addicted (from the album MDNA of 2012) and transform it into a very acid tribute to Cabaret Voltaire; in reality they do nothing but identify and amplify elements of the original production of the Italian Benny Benassi. This way of working makes it clear how much Madonna’s pieces were complex objects from a production point of view. If there is one thing that Madonna has always known how to do it was to shape the sound of the moment, even the most dissonant and radical, in order to satisfy her pop needs.
I russi Love Object spogliano Frozen (1998) of William Orbit’s production, which featured a memorable string arrangement by Craig Armstrong, and make it a cold wave piece, while the Norwegian-Italian disco duo Sally Shapiro shoots Holiday (1984) directly into space without ruining the perfect groove. There are also those who, like the French duo Double Mixte, choose a Madonna song and completely reinvent it: this is the case of their lethargic The beautiful island (1986), which looks like a slow-motion confrontation between Serge Gainsbourg and the Chromatics.
Like a virgin (1984) e Like a prayer (1989) are reprized by the retrofuturist pop duo of Mormon twins Mothermary, who grew up among their ten siblings in a religious community in Montana. The first sounds like a prayer recited in an anechoic chamber, the second is turbo-charged a fantastic bassline and given a pop joy that retains something sinister and vaguely threatening.
Johnny Jewel’s homage to Madonna’s music, like that of Sonic Youth in the late 1980s, has nothing irreverent or ironic about it. On the contrary, it offers a lateral point of view on the production of one of the greatest innovators of pop music and reveals a secret radical, if not even experimental, side.
Various Artists
Italians Do It Better – Twenty covers, 19 artists & 10 countries
Italians Do It Better, 2021