I was eleven when I first heard Cyndi Lauper’s debut album, She’s So Unusual.  Musically, that’s the age when I’d really begun to listen to music for reasons other than because my parents were listening to it (though they remained influences).  It would be understatement to say that the album spoke to me, and I remember playing it and rewinding certain songs and playing them again, so much that I wore-out the tape on the cassette and had to appeal to my grandmother to schlep me to Warehouse so she could get me another.

Of course, subtext and innuendo are wasted on a eleven-year old, even one as precocious as I, so I didn’t quite pick-up on the fact that “She Bop” was about masturbation; or that the bedroom scene in the music video for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was an allusion to my mom’s favorite Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera, and its legendary stateroom scene; or even just how true “Money Changes Everything” would prove to be.  What I did know was that the songs made me dance and spin and shake my head and generally anything to avoid doing my homework.

Not surprisingly (to anyone familiar with my musical tastes), the song that struck the deepest chord with me was the cover of the Prince-penned “When You Were Mine” (which I still adore).  For reasons that I can only ascribe to a lifelong love of funk and soul, I gravitated to Prince and his sound, from the get-go; and “Controversy” (with “When You Were Mine” as the b-side) was one of my first 12” singles.  As a result, I immediately ticked-up on Cyndi’s synth-y, ballad-y version.

Anyhoo – it’s enough to say that to those in their early forties (as I am), the songs of She’s So Unusual have appeared in the soundtrack of their lives.  Perhaps not to the extent they do in mine, but with 22 million copies sold worldwide, it’s safe to say that I’m not alone.

“But Shulman..!  How was the concert?”  I’m so glad you asked.  Over the course of the past three decades, Cyndi Lauper has become one of only twenty people, and only four women, to attain the status of GET (Grammy, Emmy, and Tony).  Is it any wonder that her voice has actually improved in that time?  Many singers, as they pass into their forties and fifties, cannot reach the higher ranges they once did.  That is not the case with Cyndi Lauper, who performed every song in its original register, and was as clear as the proverbial bell.  I would even go so far as to say that her performance was epic, and that she performed one of the tightest one-hour sets I’ve ever seen/heard (including three walks into the audience, and “reading” a woman who didn’t want to hear Cyndi talking to the crowd).

And while she’ll always be thought of as a product of the Eighties, I daresay that Cyndi Lauper represents the very best of today’s woman – a fighter for equality, a leader, a mother, a philanthropist, a trailblazer, an individual, and oh-so unusual.

Cyndi Lauper
She’s So Unusual – A 30th Anniversary Celebration
MGM Grand Garden Arena | May 25, 2014

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