Provenance: Curb find, though with a sticker from “Crazy Eddie Record & Tape Asylum”
For so much of my early life, Cyndi Lauper’s music — usually “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and “Time After Time” — was kind just... ambiently in the air. With my vague cultural memory of her association with professional wrestling, she seemed like a live-action cartoon from the Thundercats era that had somehow become flesh and blood — and then irrelevant, in that order. Then of course, there was her time on Celebrity Apprentice, which I’m not going to talk about at all.
As with a lot of things, as I got older, I reassessed and discovered, obviously, that Lauper is a national treasure. The woman left home at 17 to escape an abusive situation, traveled to Canada, worked a bunch of jobs and was, at one point, told she would never sing again after damaging her vocal cords — and this was all before she’d recorded and released She’s So Unusual in 1983.
Lauper had already been chewed up and spit out by the major label system as part of a band called Blue Angel, discovered and signed by Allman Brothers manager Steve Massarsky. She essentially went back to her roots after their debut album flopped and they broke up; it didn’t take long to get re-discovered while singing in bars and signed as a solo artist. (To her credit, she refused offers to sign her as a solo artist while a member of Blue Angel.)
There were an absolute shitload of people involved in the making of She’s So Unusual, and its personnel, if nothing else, would make it an important tributary in the waters of American music.
Ellie Greenwich — who wrote or co-wrote "Be My Baby", "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)," "Leader of the Pack," and "River Deep – Mountain High," among others — does backing vocals. Eric Bazilian, who wrote Joan Osbourne’s hit “One of Us,” plays bass and does a lot of other shit. Rick Chertoff, who also worked with Osbourne, as well as Sophie B. Hawkins, produced and arranged. Richard Termini did synths and would eventually go on to work with fellow Brooklynites Type O Negative. Engineer John Agnello got his first big break with this record, he’s gone on to become an in-demand indie dude, working with Nothing, Kurt Vile and the Hold Steady.
And, incidentally, though the cover to the record — shot in Coney Island by Annie Leibovitz— has become iconic, I can’t believe I never noticed the back sleeve, where the soles of Lauper’s high heels are printed with Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” In the end, Janet Perr picked up a Grammy for Best Recording Package in 1985 for She’s So Unusual.
Album opener “Money Changes Everything” is a cover of a 1978 song by a group called The Brains. Listening to Lauper’s version, my first thought was “This sounds like a Bruce Springsteen song,” which the original seems to hammer home — replace the synth line with a guitar riff, and it would have fit in perfectly on Born in the USA. Released as the fifth single from She’s So Unusual, it was first song from the album not to hit the Billboard Top 10, which, ouch, America — the fuck’s your problem? Comparing the two versions, I gotta say Lauper’s voice sells this song in a way writer Tom Gray’s more salt-of-the-earth yarl doesn’t. She sounds like a brash, sympathetic air-raid siren, especially near the end, where she hits and holds a series of nearly wordless, very impressive high notes.
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” had an interesting evolution. It was written by a guy named Robert Hazard, whose version opens as a turgid plod before kicking into the more familiar double-time beat. It’s good, but not great, though there’s a ripping guitar solo near the end. An early demo version of Lauper doing the song, released as part of the expanded edition of She’s So Unusual, shows how she moved the “just wanna” backing vocals that mirror the song’s central riff from an afterthought — in Hazard’s version, they only pop up at the end, and they’re pretty buried — to a central part of the arrangement. And, at some point, the extremely savvy decision to have her hike the vocal up into her higher register was made as well; she’s still singing it near the bottom of her range on that demo. In its finished form, the song barely resembles Hazard’s rock version, sounding way more like something off Prince’s Dirty Mind, which had come out in 1981. That brings us to …
I’m actually not wild about Lauper’s version of this song. For starters, it’s slower than Prince’s version and takes its time getting to the song’s defining riff, which lends it an element of throat-clearing. For seconders, there’s an extended board-fade outro with some fretless bass noodling and airy guitar atmospherics that just comes off as aimless. (Prince’s version clocks in at 3:46, Lauper’s is 5:06.) Lauper supposedly found Prince’s original lyrics misogynistic — though that sourcing is sus — and there’s an element of competitiveness to her own whistle-register dolphin-squeal at the top of the bridge, as if she’s saying, “I can do that, too.” Still, though, “When You Were Mine” is a perfect song, and Lauper absolutely sings the shit out of it — especially the way she hits the “I love you baby that’s no lie” line in the chorus — even if my heart resides with the Prince version.
Of course, speaking of perfect songs, there’s “Time After Time.” Lauper said she nicked the title from a TV Guide listing, and there’s of course an element of made-for-TV melodrama to the song, but … whew. Supposedly it was the last song recorded for the album, and her label wanted it as the lead single; she and her manager convinced them “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was the better lead-off.
Between the liquid guitar, the contrapuntal bass line and that insistent rimshot on the snare, I hear a lot of the DNA of The Police in “Time After Time.” And here’s the thing: “Every Breath You Take” was released in May ‘83 — when Lauper and co. started production on She’s So Unusual — and went on to become one of the defining songs of the year. If “Time After Time” was indeed the last song recorded for the record, there’s no way its genesis wasn’t in some way influenced by “Every Breath You Take.”
Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t link to Miles Davis’ version of the song; the man knew an amazing ballad when he heard one.
Either way, what an incredible goddamn Side 1 of a record, right?
If anything, She’s So Unusual is bound to disappoint in its back half, simply because the first side of the record is basically flawless. I personally find “She Bop” a little annoying, mostly because its central riff is so flattened out of any rhythmic nuance by being ported to synth. But anything that pissed off Tipper Gore enough to land it on the Parents Music Resource Center’s “Filthy Fifteen” list alongside Mercyful Fate and Venom means it owns by fiat. According to some oft-cited Howard Stern interview I’ve never heard, Lauper recorded the vocals in the buff, which similarly owns, and the weird, spaghetti-Western-esque whistle solo in the bridge — you guessed it — also owns. Crafting an ode to masturbation that made it this far into the mainstream is an achievement; though the video made the subtext text, the ever-sharp Lauper said she wanted kids to think the song was about dancing and only “get it” as they aged.
Conversely, I find that the synth bass on this song rips. (I’m a fickle overlord, I know.) It’s another cover, though writer Jules Shear makes an appearance, doing backing vocals. Cars guitarist Elliot Easton produced a version of this for Shear, but it was never released, making Lauper’s the definitive version, for which she cranked the key up a minor third to better fit her voice. All that said, I’m not really wild about this song overall, to be honest. There’s a barebones rehearsal take on the expanded edition that showcases the difficulty the band had with that opening arpeggio and the power of Lauper’s voice — which sounds like it’s threatening to blow out whatever the demo was recorded on — but still … meh. Pretty weird synth solo in the middle for a pop ballad, though — points for that.
There are few things I hate more than white-person reggae. If “Time After Time” seems to reflect the Police’s popularity, then “Witness” puts that at the fore, along with some extremely Flock of Seagulls-esque guitar delay. However, in this video, Lauper (in her inimitable New York honk) says the song was inspired by not wanting to “witness” a friend of hers get hit by a taxi in New York… which … well, I still hate it. But cool story. If anything, I would have been interested had this been one of the songs she chose to rearrange for her acoustic record, because I like the vocal melody, but … ugh, Jesus, she just started scatting. Hard pass.
“I’ll Kiss You” is a co-write with Shear. It’s another one that sounds vaguely Prince-esque, with the chicken-scratch guitar and layers of pillowy synths. One thing that Lauper doesn’t have, though, is Prince playing everything on these songs, so even her funk-adjacent experiments tend to come off as pretty square, but I’m still fine with it. The synths are actually pretty out of control on this one, layering in some discordant notes early on and getting into some vaguely Remain in Light squiggly territory. There are also some great deadpan backing vocals that start chiming in as the song progresses, and some nice wordless ones on the verse out of the bridge. Coming after “Witness,” and a relative deep cut, “I’ll Kiss You” is a delight.
This song, dating back to the 1920s and written by Al Sherman, Al Lewis and Abner Silver, was performed by Helen Kane, who was the inspiration for Betty Boop. If anything, its inclusion here just reinforces my twin theses that A) She’s So Unusual is a New Wave version of the great New York songwriting traditions of vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building and Phil Spector maximalist girl-group pop and B) Cyndi Lauper is an actual cartoon.
Unfortunately, Lauper would have needed one pants-shitter of a closer to compete with Side 1 of this record, and “Yeah Yeah” just ain’t it, chief. Between the hard-panned rolling-rink organ in the left channel, the honking saxophone, and the incessant Betty Boop-style vocals in the right channel, it’s kind of a mess. There’s a lot of ideas here that could have worked better if there had simply been less of them. Pan the organ less, reduce the vocal asides, keep the horn arrangements and maybe make the sax solo less of a feature (though honestly it’s a pretty good sax solo) — and you’ve got a perfectly frothy nothing of a song, but as an album closer, “Yeah Yeah” falls seriously short. I think I know what they were trying to do, which was unite all the strands of pop music Lauper was working with — there’s an explicit “River Deep — Mountain High” reference in the lyrics — in a modern setting, but … nah.
There’s a really interesting reading (mine) of this record — and Lauper’s career as a whole, especially when you take into account her writing the Broadway musical Kinky Boots, her blues record, and her acoustic record — that positions her as a link in a chain of uniquely American, feminist songwriters. With She’s So Unusual, Lauper attempted to unite Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Phil Spector and New Wave, and was almost extremely successful. I can’t get over the sequencing — Side 2 is such a letdown, mostly — but ultimately, it’s one of the rare monster smashes from the ‘80s that sounds both of its time and eternal.