(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . IVH: Cyndi Lauper / She's So Unusual [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-02 Tonight’s selections from Cyndi Lauper’s most excellent debut album, 1983’s multi-platinum She’s So Unusual. The way Cyndi Lauper uses her voice to sing is a vivid form of authorship. The Songwriters Hall of Fame member has had a hand in penning most of her work across the last 40 years, but even on a hit like “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which was written by a man, it's impossible to imagine anyone else making it such an immortal anthem. The expressiveness of her phrasing on the song—sometimes sounding like Betty Boop with the hiccups—transforms simple lines into hook-y marvels. Elsewhere on her classic 1983 debut, She's So Unusual, Lauper sings in a proto-riot grrrl bark, sounds like Yoko Ono fronting the ska band Madness, and holds one of my favorite glory notes in all of pop music, right from the heart, on “All Through the Night.” [...] The singer's eclecticism and four-octave range made her an island of one in the strange ocean of 1980s pop. She felt like one, too, with a sense of isolation from other women artists and chauvinism plaguing her interactions with industry types. But Lauper, raised in an Italian neighborhood in Ozone Park, Queens, was eternally scrappy. “Even when I did the 'Girls Just Want to Have Fun' video, we didn't have the money that everybody else was spending,” she says. “We had a lot of money—$30,000—but it wasn't $50,000, let alone half a million, like 'Thriller.' It was the little engine that could. All my friends came. I opened up my closet, everybody wore my sunglasses—then I came down with pink eye, so maybe that wasn't a good idea.” — Pitchfork Girls Just Want to Have Fun The sound of the '80s had yet to be defined, and in the latter half of 1983, two very strong, independent women wound up releasing their debuts within months of each other, and invariably wound up providing the pop music zeitgeist many people had been waiting for. Those ladies, of course, were Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. Madonna's self-titled debut came out that July, and although her initial singles fared well on Billboard's dance charts, her straightforward, remarkably-appealing dance pop hadn't yet had a chance to break through to a wider audience. Meanwhile, after numerous setbacks for her band Blue Angel (and numerous financial and vocal difficulties on top of that), a young New Yorker named Cyndi Lauper was prepping her full-length solo debut. Her album, She's So Unusual, unleashed its lead single, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, on September 6th, 1983. The following day, Madonna released “Holiday”, her breakout chart entry. Both songs went on to be huge hits, and as the years rolled on, these women wound up defining not just the 80s, but the very template for female pop stars for decades to follow. Thus, looking back on the release of Lauper's debut album some three decades down the line in the form of a “30th Anniversary Celebration“, some would be surprised to learn that, in fact, half the album is made up of covers. Georgia cult rockers The Brains had their signature song “Money Changes Everything” picked as She's So Unusual's opening salvo, while folk artist Jules Shear's “All Through the Night” got a plumb role on Side B, and New Wave songwriter Robert Hazard saw his quirky one-off “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” transformed into a earth-shattering, Grammy-nominated chart topper. Toss in a cover of Prince's “When You Were Mine”, and you have an album that doesn't plays more as a personal mixtape than an album proper, but the mish-mash of styles — which is what the 80s were very much about — is what by-and-large gave Lauper's solo album such a unique identity. — Pop Matters When You Were Mine . Time After Time With brash red hair, outlandish dresses plucked from the racks of the downtown vintage shrine Screaming Mimi's, and a Noo Yawk accent that announced itself almost as soon as she opened her mouth, Cyndi Lauper was (and continues to be) a day-glo pop star whose oversized personality was well-suited to the nascent MTV age. It helped, too, that the songs on the cover of her 1983 debut She's So Unusual were tailored specifically to her personality—the effervescent girl-power anthem "Girls Just Want To Have Fun," the sober "Time After Time," the sweetly wistful (and Prince-penned) "When You Were Mine." [...] "Unusual" is normally a pejorative when applied to women, but Lauper bucked that convention with a particular glee. "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" is Lauper's signature hit, and with good reason: The whoops and crowds of ladies singing in unison harness the joy that defines so much of her output, from her earliest solo work to the music she penned for Broadway's Kinky Boots. But there's also a big clue to her lasting appeal in its final verse: "Some boys take a beautiful girl/And hide her away from the rest of the world/I wanna be the one to walk in the sun." In Hazard's original, the final line is "All my girls are gonna walk in the sun"—a change that implies not only ownership of, but a chilling sameness to the women who he'll encounter in his life. With that one subtle shift, though, Lauper's song becomes an anthem for any woman who want to break free from the expectations placed on her shoulders—whether by dancing or singing or simply heading out on her own, the sun's warmth hitting her face as she contemplates freedom. — Complex Money Changes Everything For people who don't fit in, a common coping mechanism involves leaning into being really weird or different. That way you're not trying to conform to some impossible stereotype or societal norm; instead, you're creating your own niche where you belong. Growing up with a disability, that was certainly my approach. (I wrote about that a bit in a 2018 essay about Doc Martens.) I think that's one reason why I love She's So Unusual (and Lauper herself) so much. Her fashion sense certainly telegraphed an aesthetic of nonconformity. But Lauper didn't try to camouflage her unique qualities: her singular voice, her voracious love of multiple music genres, her vulnerability, her live charisma. Instead, she considered them assets and strengths. Even the name of her album—She's So Unusual—reclaimed a pejorative term, transforming being “unusual” into something to celebrate. Women are (still) often taught to suppress the parts of themselves that might be seen as difficult (or different) to achieve professional success or land a successful relationship. But on She's So Unusual, Lauper wasn't afraid to show all sides of herself—the times when she felt heartbroken, sexually liberated, feminist, vulnerable, happy, sad, flirty, silly, contemplative. This wasn't one-dimensional womanhood, but a messy, bold vision of how to live life in brilliant color. Best of all, She's So Unusual was a massive success. Weirdness won—and so did Lauper's offbeat vision. Forty years later, She's So Unusual is still incredibly comforting—and deeply inspirational. — Annie Zaleski She Bop . All Through the Night . WHO’S TALKING TO WHO? Jimmy Kimmel: Mariah Carey, Alex Edelman, Allison Russell Jimmy Fallon: Sheryl Crow, Cailee Spaeny Stephen Colbert: Pete Buttigieg, Willie Nelson Seth Meyers: James Austin Johnson, Connor Denis The Daily Show: Guest host Charlamagne Tha God LAST WEEK'S POLL: BREAD Brioche 5% Challah 8% Cornbread 3% Focaccia 5% Multigrain 3% Pita Bread 0% Potato Bread 5% Pumpernicke l8% Rye Bread 14% Sourdough 38% Whole Wheat 11% Other 0% [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/2/2189183/-IVH-Cyndi-Lauper-She-s-So-Unusual?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/