Ciccone Youth - Addicted To Love

What this video is

Released in 1988 as part of The Whitey Album, this video arrives at a pivotal moment when MTV's visual grammar had become the dominant currency of pop credibility. By shooting in a consumer Macy's video booth and recording vocals in a karaoke kiosk, Ciccone Youth (the Sonic Youth side project named after Madonna's legal surname, Madonna Louise Ciccone) performs a double act of appropriation: covering a canonical…

Why it matters

This artifact is a foundational document of the underground-to-mainstream dialectic in late-1980s American alternative music. It prefigures the lo-fi aesthetic that would define early-1990s indie rock, demonstrates the art-rock tradition of treating music video as conceptual readymade, and serves…

The director

Kim Gordon (born April 28, 1953, Rochester, NY) is an American musician, visual artist, and writer. She studied at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and co-founded Sonic Youth in New York City in 1981. A practicing visual artist since the late 1970s, she…