Produced by soul pioneer Steve Cropper, the album includes the Top 40 hits "Ain't Even Done with the Night", which reached No.

The woman pictured on the album's cover and seen 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.

"[1] A remastered version of Nothin' Matters and What If It Did was released on Mercury/Island/UMe on March 29, 2005; it includes one bonus track, "Latest Game", which, according to the liner notes, was taken from the sessions for Mellencamp's 1982 album American Fool.

"Hot Night in a Cold Town,” the only song on the album that Mellencamp didn’t write, was written by Geoffrey Cushing-Murray and Richard Littlefield.

Mellencamp explained in Tim Holmes' 1986 biography how he discovered the song: "Man, I get a lot more demo tapes than you’ve ever seen in your life.

In his 1986 biography on Mellencamp, author Martin Torgoff called "Tonight" "a funky, high-stepping ditty about the joyous lubricity a blue-collar worker feels for his woman during the day that could very well have been one of [Mellencamp's] hottest songs had it not been for one X-rated line, involving a part of the female anatomy being applied to the fellow's face, that kept it off the radio."

Many reviewers found the sexual songs tasteless and gratuitous; others liked the bright accessibility of "This Time" and "Ain't Even Done with the Night".

Only the Chicago Sun-Times, calling Mellencamp a "poet of the real world", weighed in with a rave review, saying: "Spirit, spark and not a little smartalecky sass—these are the essential ingredients of John Cougar's music .