Although it is suggested through only a few songs, the album is somewhat a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Madonna and 1980s pop in general. Ahead of Madonna’s 60th birthday in 2018, frontman Thurston Moore told The Guardian:
Madonna was actually in a couple of no-wave bands that nobody ever talks about. She was in a band with these two twins, Dan and Josh Braun, who were the first members of Swans, Michael Gira's band. Nobody really knows about that part of her history; she was in a pre-Swans no wave band! There's all that interconnected history in New York with Madonna and the no wave scene. Eventually she started making really amazing dance records. "Into the Groove" was brilliant to the point where I thought it would be a great song to cover through the prism of Sonic Youth. Instantly fabulous. We took her record and put it on one of the channels in the studio and we would fade it into the song once in a while, not thinking about the legalities of such a move. We made a 12-inch with Mike Watt from Minutemen on a label called New Alliance, a sub-label of Black Flag's SST Records . We wanted to break down any kind of barrier that was being set up between the underground and the people who had graduated from it to the mainstream. We actually embraced Madonna's joie de vivre, her celebrity. We did that record and everybody felt we were crazy, and some people lambasted us for giving her some kind of credibility in the underground. But she already had credibility, as far as I was concerned; she was already a part of the downtown scene. I don't think she capitalised on it.
Contrary to many Sonic Youth albums, drum machines and samplers are the foundation of the recording, but Sonic Youth's trademark dissonance and experimental methods still permeate throughout. The album featured a new version of an early Sonic Youth song, "Making the Nature Scene". Track 2, "", is a titular one minute gap of silence intended as a tribute to John Cage. Mike Watt's only contribution is a version of Madonna's "Burnin' Up," on which he sang and played all instruments.
Artwork
According to the liner notes of the deluxe edition of Daydream Nation: "The album cover , a b&w xerox enlargement of Madonna's face, was a brilliant and contemporary design. Sonic Youth had employed found images on album covers before, but this was testing the limit. We sent copies of the vinyl album to Warners to be passed on to Madonna via her sister who worked in the art department there. Word came back that she had no problem with it acknowledging she remembered the band from her NYC Danceteria days".
Reception
The album received generally mixed reviews from critics. Trouser Press wrote "the joke doesn't translate, and the disc comes across as a self-indulgent mess".
