| Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual would make a great subject for a 33 1/3 volume. Won't happen, but possible angles would include: videogeneity; the "rock and wrestling connection"; Madonna v. Cyndi as a rehearsal for Britney v. Cristina -- not in all ways, but at least in being an earlier instance of the studio-creation/singer-with-chops false opposition. I'd be particularly interested in knowing how the album's outside material was chosen: "She Bop" (which, strangely, just came on the radio here) and "Time After Time" are co-writes with song doctors, but the album also made serious coin for three up-to-that-point marginal new wavers: Robert Hazard ("Girls..."), Tom Gray of The Brains ("Money Changes Everything"), and Jules Shear of the videoless Jules and the Polar Bears ("All Through The Night," from one of Shear's solo albums, slightly predated The Bangles' tense-challenged "If She Knew What She Wants"). On the other hand, "He's So Unusual," regendered to refer to the singer herself for the album title, was a 1929 hit for Helen Kane, the singer who put the "boop-boop-a-doop" in "I Wanna Be Loved By You," thus establishing the singing style Lauper ably updated -- and prefiguring her drift toward the sort of standard-bearing of which J-Hova is not fond. |
