Nothin' Matters and What If It Did
| Nothin' Matters And What If It Did | ||||
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| Studio album by John Cougar | ||||
| Released | September 15, 1980 | |||
| Recorded | 1980 | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 35:59 | |||
| Label | Riva | |||
| Producer | Steve Cropper | |||
| John Cougar chronology | ||||
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| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |
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| The Rolling Stone Album Guide |
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Nothin' Matters and What If It Did is John Mellencamp's fourth studio album, under his pseudonym of John Cougar. It includes the moderate hits "Ain't Even Done with the Night," which reached #17 on the Billboard Hot 100 as the album's second single, and "This Time," which peaked at #27 as the album's lead single.
"The singles were stupid little pop songs," Mellencamp told Record Magazine in 1983. "I take no credit for that record. It wasn't like the title was made up – it wasn't supposed to be punky or cocky like some people thought. Toward the end, I didn't even go to the studio. Me and the guys in the band thought we were finished, anyway. It was the most expensive record I ever made. It cost $280,000, do you believe that? The worst thing was that I could have gone on making records like that for hundreds of years. Hell, as long as you sell a few records and the record company isn't putting a lot of money into promotion, you're making money for 'em and that's all they care about. PolyGram loved Nothin' Matters. They thought I was going to turn into the next Neil Diamond."
Mellencamp wrote "To M.G. (Wherever She May Be)" in remembrance of his high school girlfriend, whose name was Margie (aka M.G.). "I'm not a nostalgic person, so it always surprises me that I'm pretty good at writing nostalgic songs," Mellencamp said in the liner notes to his 2010 box set On the Rural Route 7609. "It's like there is a nostalgic part of me that I won't admit to myself. But I wrote the song in 1977 in Germany, and it's about my first girlfriend. I had watched a Bette Davis film, and I always thought this girl acted like and in a funny way looked like Bette Davis, even when were kids. I saw her a couple of years ago, and she said that it was one of the happiest moments in her life that I had taken the time to reflect back and write a song about us as adolescents. She was really kind."
The woman on the album's cover and in the music video for "This Time" is actress Edith Massey, a member of the Dreamlanders troupe who often appeared in the films of John Waters. Massey was chosen because, as Mellencamp told Rolling Stone in late 1980, "I was looking for a typical heavy woman to convey a lower-middle-class way of living."
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