FEATURE:
Time After Time
Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual at Forty
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THE summer and autumn of 1983…
PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images
were a fascinating and exciting one for Pop. Two incredible women, Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, released their debut albums then. Madonna’s eponymous album came out in July. On 14th October, Cyndi Lauper released She’s So Unusual. I am going to get to some features about the album. Even though the thirtieth anniversary reissue was released in 2014 – I can never understand why that was -, there is another reissue coming out in seems for the fortieth. It is one of those classics that every home should have. Before getting to the features and reviews, Wikipedia give us some background to Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 debut, in addition to the huge impact She’s So Unusual has had:
“In 1978, Lauper formed the band Blue Angel. The band soon signed a recording contract with Polydor Records; however, their debut album, Blue Angel, was a commercial failure. The band parted ways after firing their manager, who sued Lauper for $80,000 and forced her into bankruptcy Lauper went on to sing in many New York night clubs, and caught the eye of David Wolff, who became her manager and subsequently got her signed to Portrait Records.
Six singles were released from the album, with "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" becoming a worldwide hit and her first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. "Time After Time" became her first number-one hit on the chart and experienced similar success worldwide. Lauper found success with the next two singles as well, with both "She Bop" and "All Through the Night" peaking in the top five. This makes Lauper the first female singer to have four top five singles on the Hot 100 from one album. She's So Unusual was promoted by the Fun Tour throughout 1983 and 1984.
The album is primarily new wave-based, with many of the songs being influenced by synthpop and pop rock. Upon its release, the album received positive reviews from music critics, who noted Lauper's unique vocals. Lauper earned several awards and accolades for the album, including two Grammy Awards at the 27th Grammy Awards, one of which was for Best New Artist. She's So Unusual peaked at number four on the Billboard 200 chart and stayed in the chart's top forty for 65 weeks. It has sold over 6 million copies in the United States and 25 million copies worldwide. This makes it Lauper's best-selling album to date and one of the best-selling albums of the 1980s. In 2003, She's So Unusual was ranked at number 494 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and it subsequently placed at number 184 in a 2020 reboot of the list.[ In 2019, the album was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Before concentrating on features from 2014 that looked at the thirtieth anniversary celebration of She’s So Unusual, Classic Pop took us inside a fantastic debut from an iconic artist. Forty years later, She’s So Unusual sounds fresh and relevant. I think that it is one of those albums that people will be discovering for decades to come. A timeless classic:
“By the time Cyndi Lauper achieved her breakthrough in 1983 with the feelgood anthem Girls Just Want To Have Fun, no one was more in need of the chance to let down her flame-red hair than Cyndi herself, whose tumultuous trip to the top had been littered with a catalogue of catastrophes which would have deterred lesser artists from pursuing their dream.
Having been discovered by manager Steve Massarsky in 1978 fronting new wave/rockabilly group Blue Angel, Cyndi, a mesmerising day-glow diva with a four-octave vocal range, turned down a series of solo record deal offers in favour of pursuing success with the band. After just one unsuccessful album, the band fired Massarsky as their manager. He sued them for $80,000, forcing them to break-up and Cyndi to file for bankruptcy. Her run of bad luck continued when she suffered an inverted cyst on her vocal cord, causing her to lose her voice and face the devastating possibility that her singing career was over before it had even started.
After recovering from surgery, Cyndi was forced to work a series of jobs waitressing and in stores during the day while singing in bars at night. It was whilst she was performing in a New York bar that David Wolff offered to act as her manager. With nothing to lose, Cyndi agreed and, within weeks, was fielding offers from various labels. She chose Epic as: “they didn’t already have a female solo star”.
Epic paired Cyndi with producer Rick Chertoff, who suggested she worked with The Hooters, a rock/reggae/ska band he had recently produced. Finding that their sound was something she felt she could use as a foundation for her own, Cyndi headed to their Philadelphia studio to begin working on her album. Once in the studio, Lauper had a very clear idea of how she wanted her record to sound but was dismayed to find that her ideas weren’t welcomed and she was presented with songs she didn’t want to sing.
When boundaries were established and the band realised that Cyndi knew what she was talking about, a mutual respect developed and the sessions proceeded smoothly. Within the first two weeks, All Through The Night, When You Were Mine and Money Changes Everything were all completed and provided a basis for the remainder of the album. With half of the album finished and happy with the tracks they had laid down, Cyndi relented and finally agreed to record Robert Hazard’s Girls Just Want To Have Fun, a song Rick Chertoff had persistently asked her to record for the album.
Among the songs Cyndi wrote were She Bop, the tongue-in-cheek ode to masturbation, and the timeless ballad Time After Time, two diverse songs that showed her not only to be a great songwriter but also a versatile one. The label were so taken with the latter that they wanted to release it as the first single, but Cyndi refused, wanting a fun, upbeat song to launch the record, feeling it was more representative of the album as a body of work.
Girls Just Want To Have Fun was released in September 1983 to a muted reception. With little initial radio or MTV airplay, Cyndi’s manager Dave came up with a plan to publicise her in the unlikely arena of the World Wrestling Federation – a hugely successful show in which Cyndi would appear in sketches in return for them showing her video. The move proved hugely successful: wrestler Captain Lou starred in Cyndi’s videos (he played her father in Girls…), Cyndi was invited on to top-rated talk shows, radio and MTV began playing it more and it eventually became a huge hit, reaching No.2 in the US, repeating the success around the world, including the UK in the following months”.
Let’s ends with some celebration and spotlighting of the thirtieth anniversary release of She’s So Unusual from 2014. Pop Matters noted how the album has some amazing covers. Even though Cyndi Lauper co-wrote some of the album’s best tracks, anthems such as Girls Just Want to Have Fun were written earlier – in this case, Robert Hazard wrote it earlier in 1983. Cyndi Lauper had this ability to interpret songs and make them hers:
“A lot of people tend to forget that She’s So Unusual is one hell of a covers album.
At the start of the ’80s, the post-disco comedown that America was experiencing was leading to a bit of an identity crisis in the realm of pop music. New Wave hits by Blondie were coming through radio dials, Hall & Oates were just warming up, and flashy singles from Soft Cell, Olivia Newton-John, and Kim Carnes were all doing boffo business. However, despite the commercial and cultural success of some of these tracks, nothing was really defining the era as of yet. Pop and rock were mingling on the charts with surprising ease, but artists like Tommy Tutone and Juice Newton were only adding color to the mix: 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.
However, some 30 years down the line, certain parts of She’s So Unusual haven’t aged particularly well, and despite all the additional ephemera included here, there are still some problematic songs that continue to rub shoulders with tracks that have come nothing less than generational touchstones.
Take, for example, the controversial Top Five hit “She Bop”, a wry ode to female masturbation that also opened She’s So Unusual‘s flip-side. The gritty guitar and by-then-numbers synth roll that anchor the track’s hook feels tied down to then-trendy New Wave songwriting tropes, and feels far more dated than it does timeless, pop music’s equivalent to empty calories. “I’ll Kiss You”, similarly, has verses that are as jam-packed with more squiggly synth effects than you can shine a strobe-light at, but it’s barely saved by a strong, rubbery chorus, low bass voices anchoring Lauper’s Betty Boop squeak, which makes her empowering take-charge anthem all the more potent.
Yet even with those songs showing their age in sometimes painful ways (and “Yeah Yeah” truly feeling like a song that was tacked on to the end ‘cos no one could determine whether it was a B-side or album track), there are still more than enough highlights on She’s So Unusual to make it worthy of its iconic status. “Time After Time” continues its quiet campaign to be known as the single best song Lauper has ever written (its development chronicled in Jancee Dunn’s press-release-ready liner notes, which paints Lauper’s story with rainbow pastels and shies away from any real grit), and the reggae-affected guitar crunch of “Witness” is basically the blueprint for every No Doubt song ever written. Her full-bodied take on Prince’s “When You Were Mine”, meanwhile, is done in such a way that it feels like a tune Lauper herself has written, as her occasionally-sung, occasionally-conversational vocals show a true sense of ownership over the material”.
I want to end with a review. SLANT had their say on this remarkable and influential album. Even though they feel that Lauper peaked at the start of her career, that takes nothing away from the brilliance of the 1983 release – and it is subjective as to whether she released anything as good as She’s So Unusual after that:
“Cyndi Lauper suffers from a severe case of what we here at Slant like to call A.P.T.S.A.B.R.O.E. (translation: Artist Peaks Too Soon And Becomes Relic Of Era). Lauper’s debut, She’s So Unusual, was an expertly-produced collection of songs that, while undeniably time-stamped, were well-crafted and durable. Each of Lauper’s subsequent efforts paled in the shadow of its predecessor, but the fact that her career waned doesn’t make She’s So Unusual any less of a pop classic. Half of the album consisted of cover songs, but these weren’t just “covers.” Each song was a unique arrangement that reflected a then-new pop-cult personality and voice. Lauper’s more accessible rendition of underground New Wave band the Brains’s “Money Changes Everything” took on new meaning in Reagan-era 1984, while the bisexual overtones of a lyrically-in-tact, synth-driven subversion of Prince’s “When You Were Mine” is difficult to ignore: “I never was the kind to make a fuss/When he was there/Sleepin’ in between the two of us.” Two other covers, a poppy redo of Jules Shear’s eccentric “All Through the Night” and the reggae-hued anthem “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” emerged as two of the greatest pop masterpieces of the ’80s. It’s not until the ageless ballad “Time After Time” that Lauper makes her first songwriting contribution. With its simple keyboard-synth chords, bright, jangly guitars, clock-ticking percussion, and elastic bassline, the song is the album’s finest moment, if not Lauper’s greatest moment period. Her voice is deeper than on the chirpy Betty Boop-inspired one-two punch of “He’s So Unusual” and “Yeah Yeah,” the solemnity of her performance starkly contrasting her provocative, tongue-in-cheek ode to masturbation “She Bop.” It’s this rare balance of camp and candor that set Lauper apart from her contemporaries and continues to retain her place in the pop pantheon”.
On 14th October, the brilliant She’s So Unusual turns forty. If you have not heard the album before then make sure that you do! It contains classics like Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Time After Time, and lesser-heard greats such as Witness and I’ll Kiss You. Such a solid and extraordinary introduction from a legend. One hopes that she gets inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame soon, as she missed out this year. One cannot deny that the brilliant She’s So Unusual was one of the greatest releases of 1983 – in a particularly strong year for Pop music. It remains a classic…
TO this day.