Happy 40th Anniversary to Cyndi Lauper’s debut album She’s So Unusual, originally released October 14, 1983.
There’s a tiny hole in the frosted glass window of the bathroom door in Ozone Park, Queens. Cyndi Lauper’s stepfather once threw her mother against that door during one of their fights, her wedding ring smacking against it and leaving the tiny hole behind. Now teenage Cyndi is climbing naked into the bathtub, her mother out at her waitressing job, when she sees her stepfather’s eye through the hole and hears his creepy laugh. She knows that this time there’s nothing left to do except leave.
So she takes a change of underwear, a toothbrush, and a copy of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and stuffs it all into a paper bag. She makes dinner for her little brother Butch and leaves it in the oven to warm. Back before her parents divorced, Cyndi once watched her mother sit at the edge of the tub and sing a heart-warming version of Al Jolson’s “Sonny Boy” to her brother nestled in her lap. But now everything’s gone to shit, so she’s taking the train to the Long Island Railroad and then a bus to Valley Stream, where her older sister Elen lives.
It would be impossible to know any of this in 1983 when Cyndi Lauper became a household name with She’s So Unusual, because the household in the video for her hit “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” was so warm and zany. The first time I saw it, I was a little kid whose family had just moved from an American navy base in Spain to an American army base in Cold War Germany. The base in Germany was gray and dismal, except for a burger joint in the PX (shopping) complex that had a video jukebox. I’d drag my parents in there to eat floppy fries and government-issue hamburgers, all so that I could plunk quarters into that jukebox and watch Cyndi sing her feminist anthem.
It was a fantastic year for feminism, and particularly the feminist music video. "The year 1983 marks a watershed in the history of female-address video,” notes critic Lisa A. Lewis in Gender, Politics & MTV. “It is the year that certain issues and representations began to gain saliency and the textual strategies of female address began to coalesce." And Lauper, specifically, stood out: “Lauper's self-consciousness about representation, her ability to use visual language to overturn staid images, create song authorship, and build a musical career are indicative of new directions in female musicianship and the important role played by music video.” But Lauper’s videos were merely one component of her magic. She’s So Unusual is a serious record about fun—a sophisticated fusion of the era’s best sounds, an exploration of wild independence and what it truly means to be a modern woman.
Growing up, Lauper had heard many tragic stories about women. Her mother had loved music, but she wasn’t allowed to accept a singing scholarship to a performing-arts high school because her grandparents believed that “only whores go to school in Manhattan.” Meanwhile, Lauper’s aunt Gracie had wanted to be a model—she’d had the looks and the height—but her parents found the portfolio she’d put together for modeling agencies and tore up the photos. And Lauper’s grandmother wasn’t much better off, having spent most of her life cooking and cleaning and tucked away from the world in dull, dutiful domesticity.
At first, Lauper didn’t want to sing a song called “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”—she’d seen how the “free love” movement of the ’60s and ’70s mostly benefited men and not women—but then her producer Rick Chertoff told her, “Think about what this song could mean.” “I saw my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my mother’s faces in my head,” Lauper recalls. “And I thought maybe I could do something and say something so loud that every girl would hear. […] It would be a movement right under all the oppressors’ noses, and no one would know about it until there was nothing they could do to stop it. I’d make it work for every poor sucker whose dreams and joys were dashed out.”
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But to get to that point, Lauper had to endure her own hardships. Like her mother, she’d dreamed of attending a performing-arts high school, but her guidance counselor snidely asked her mother if she wanted Cyndi to end up waiting tables like she did. He suggested that she instead attend the High School of Fashion Industries in Manhattan. Lauper would eventually become as well-known for her fashion sense as for her voice, but fashion wasn’t her main passion and so she struggled, preferring the art classes the school offered to its sewing and design courses. And traditional subjects like English and math—forget about it. Eventually, she dropped out and returned to school in Queens, where her friend Susan introduced her to the women’s movement and they briefly formed a folk duo.
In 1970, Lauper left home—and school—to avoid her stepfather’s creepiness, moving in with her sister and her friend Wha in Valley Stream. Lauper was young and inexperienced, and so it was difficult to hold down a job. She worked briefly at Simon & Schuster as a secretary, but the girls survived mostly through the generosity of Wha’s parents, who weren’t wealthy themselves. Often, in order to eat for the day, Lauper would go to the local Hare Krishna temple and do some cleaning in exchange for food. Then, one winter day, a pregnant dog followed her home, and even though she could barely feed herself, Lauper named the dog Sparkle and the girls took her in. Sparkle would end up being Lauper’s loyal companion throughout many adventures.
Eventually, the girls moved to nearby West Hempstead, where life got harder. The guys next door were drug dealers, the girls never had enough to eat, and Lauper worked at an IHOP until her manager groped her during a shift. Soon, she landed an interview for another job, hitchhiking out of desperation. The guy who picked her up wouldn’t let her out of the car until she performed oral sex on him. The interview didn’t go well, and she blamed herself for the assault. Finally, she landed steady employment at a shoe store and began living with an older guy named Phil. Mostly, Phil wanted her to cook and clean and to not spend her time painting and writing songs.
One bright spot during this meager time was a painting studio Lauper had discovered in Queens before she left home, where she met her mentor Bob Barrell. She’d go back to visit him, and they’d sit for hours chatting and painting. During one session, Lauper told Barrell how Phil always went camping without her (“I’m going to go camping, and I’m going to leave him,” she vowed.) Barrell suggested she go to Canada and do a tree study (a sketching of trees), and his advice was all she needed to gather up Sparkle and leave New York—and Phil.
She spent two weeks in Canada, and when she returned, her mother had decided to divorce her stepfather. Lauper moved back home for a while, but then she met a guy named Richie and they took off for Massachusetts. One night, while sitting by the fire, Richie told her, “You shouldn’t spell your name Cindy, you should spell it C-Y-N-D-I” and that’s how she’s spelled it ever since. She took a job as a nanny, until one of the kids ran over Sparkle with a tractor (miraculously, the dog lived), so she split for Vermont.
She enrolled at Johnson State College, while also working as a nude model for a watercolor class and deejaying at the college radio station. “I brought more women to the airwaves, and I was the first female streaker on campus, too,” she writes. She stayed in Vermont for a year, but besides her art classes, she was failing her other courses and so she left. (Lauper suspects that ADD, combined with unresolved trauma, contributed to her difficulties in school.)
She returned to New York in 1972, and that’s when she started really getting into music. One night at a party at Barrell’s painting studio, she was playing her guitar and singing when another student told her, “You know, you have a professional voice—you should really sing professionally.” She took the advice, joining a band as a backup singer. “Immediately, when I joined a band, my socks weren’t so funny, I didn’t stand out,” she told 60 Minutes Australia. “I’d found my tribe—I belonged.” Eventually, the band was approached by a manager who told them that he’d only work with them if the guy who sang lead switched places with Lauper.
After that meeting, Lauper sensed some tension but a few nights later at a band get-together, everything seemed fine—in fact, everyone was laughing at a huge collection of dildos the lead singer and his girlfriend had in their apartment. Then suddenly, the atmosphere shifted. The guy’s girlfriend and her sister grabbed Lauper and held her down, while the male singer pulled down Lauper’s pants and raped her with one of the dildos. “I was kind of stunned for a long time,” she writes. “I thought that when you’re in a band, you’re family.” To add insult to injury, the band fired her before she could make the decision to leave.
Eventually, Lauper started another band called Flyer, this time as its lead singer, working in her off-time as a topless dancer so the band could buy a PA. However, she grew frustrated with how difficult it was to write songs with her bandmates, and eventually she met a guy named John Turi with whom she felt immediate creative chemistry. So she ditched Flyer to form a new band with Turi called Blue Angel.
By that point, Lauper was 30 years old and beginning to feel desperate, praying that the demos Blue Angel recorded might land them something big. Sometimes, too, people were unkind. “I had people come up to me and say that I sang like a rat,” she recalls. “I didn’t care, because the sound made me feel great.” One night, the Allman Brothers’ manager came to see them perform at a club, but nothing came of it. Then, Turi found another manager—a weird guy who had a habit of picking his scalp until it bled—and in 1980, that guy landed them a record deal with Polydor. But Blue Angel continued to struggle, so Lauper took a job at a department store.
Almost from the beginning, Polydor made it clear they thought Lauper would be more successful as a solo artist. Meanwhile, Blue Angel was still going nowhere, so Lauper took another job at Screaming Mimi’s, the East Village vintage store that shaped her signature style. On New Year’s Eve 1982, it was undeniable that Blue Angel had hit a dead end—the band’s gig was at a dive bar in Passaic, New Jersey. “It was called Hitsville, but I called it Shitsville, because that’s what it felt like,” Lauper recalls.
So Lauper finally went solo, but first she had to go to court and fight a bitter battle to get out from under Blue Angel’s sleazy ex-manager. Once she did, her boyfriend Dave Wolff began managing her, scoring her a meeting with Lennie Petze at Epic. Petze introduced her to producer Rick Chertoff, who’d been working with a band called the Hooters. In the spring of ’83, Lauper went to Philadelphia to work on She’s So Unusual with Chertoff, as well as Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman of the Hooters. The album would pair their reggae sound with a punk sensibility inspired by The Clash and The Police, along with liberal use of a gated snare drum that Lauper had adored in Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance.”
She’s So Unusual kicks off with the big, booming “Money Changes Everything” (inspired by “London Calling”) and we’re introduced to Lauper’s full commitment as a singer. She means every single note, and it comes from the guts and the whole heart. There’s a tinge of her quirky Queens accent, and a little bit of Stevie Nicks’ huskiness—but, still, it’s all Cyndi. Most of us would be able to recognize her GRAMMY-winning voice anywhere.
And money did, indeed, change everything. Not long after Lauper became a star after She’s So Unusual, she ran into the shitty little weasel who raped her—the singer from her old band—when she was out shopping in a fancy chauffeured car. Turns out, he was working in a crappy little deli. (Karma’s a bad bitch.)
Next is the sublime party that is “Girls Just Want To Have Fun.” As a kid, I remember hearing the line “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” and thinking, Fuck yes, Cyndi. I had already been indoctrinated with Disney princess propaganda, so her words resonated powerfully. (And, soon, all of my Barbies had asymmetrical, magic-marker Cyndi hair.)
The synth-y “When You Were Mine” is another classic—one penned by Prince. “I didn’t know Prince then, he was just a skinny guy in a G-string with a jacket who opened for the Rolling Stones and stirred things up,” Lauper told Spotify. “I thought, ok, he’s an interesting character, and I also loved the way the story in the song read.” It captures a relationship where the narrator still loves their partner (Lauper didn’t change the pronouns to reflect a girl singing about a guy) even though that partner is cheating—and might already be gone.
“Time After Time,” with its ticking waltz to reflect the opening line, is the ultimate prom song—so incredibly wistful and romantic. It was inspired by the difficulties producer Rick Chertoff and Lauper were having in their respective relationships. Then-boyfriend David Wolff stars with Lauper in the video, and the song’s title was ripped from a TV Guide listing the 1979 movie Time After Time. Epic encouraged Lauper to release it as her first single, but she didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a ballad singer, so she smartly chose “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” instead.
“She Bop,” with a rockabilly sound styed after ’50s star The Big Bopper, is a slyly winking ode to female masturbation. Lauper had heard that Yoko Ono once recorded a song naked, and so she recorded “She Bop” naked in the privacy of the back studio—just for giggles. Next, the baroque, shimmery “All Through The Night” marks the appearance of another ballad, with a message of everlasting love. Meanwhile, the reggae-studded “Witness” was inspired by a friend who almost got hit by a taxi. “In New York City, cab driving is like a game—10 points for every person you hit. I was like, hey, you wanna stand on the curb, I don’t want to be a witness,” Lauper told Spotify. And then she went up to her apartment and wrote the song on her guitar.
The end of the album is all about unadulterated fun. “I’ll Kiss You” is funky ’80s in an over-the-top synth vein, full of visits to gypsies and the drinking of love potions. “He’s So Unusual” is a variety-show cabaret with clanking piano and Lauper singing in an exaggerated old-timey accent. The final song “Yeah Yeah” is sonic neon zebra print—zigzagging synth, Lauper’s wild animal calls, a total raucous party on roller skates.
In 2019, the Library of Congress chose She’s So Unusual for preservation in the United States Recording Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” It’s all of those things, and perhaps the most poignant aspect of the acknowledgment is that Lauper was also recognized for all (or at least some of) what she had to go through to get there. “Cyndi was not one to let anything stop her from continuing to move her career and talent forward. She had faced abuse from critics, band members, and many of the individuals who pull the strings in the business,” the entry reads. “Now she was determined to go her own way.”
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