http://open.spotify.com/album/2aZG65CSBMeTKr0YNfsFMe
She's got red hair
But we don't care
Cyndi, Cyndi Lauper
It's almost impossible to have a dedicated opinion on Cyndi Lauper (go on, try it. Can't can you?); in the 25+ years since this, her debut was released you really can't picture one person either desperately falling in love with her music or despising it to the point of sledgehammering records (even though this album sold sixteen MILLION copies!!!! Have you ever met anyone who could even recall seeing a copy lying around a vague aquaintance's house?). What can you possibly say about her? She did that song about girls having fun that isn't actually half as irritating as it could be; she's so New York that she pronounces her hometown 'Noo Yoik'; plus this album contains a cover of 'When You Were Mine', which is one of my favourite Prince songs, and I'm all ready to absolutely despise it. Still, 'Time After Time's quite nice isn't it? This may be a short entry...
01:41 The opening track, a cover of The Beats' 'Money Changes Everything', is pretty good actually, a bit like The Pretenders fronted by one of Fraggle Rock
04:41 While we're on the subject of that voice- it has all the necessary ingredients-nasal, shouty, brattish, etc- to be epically infuriating, but it's a credit to both the producers and Lauper herself for utilising it in a way that very rarely makes to want to chew your ears off
05:35 Aaah, 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun'. Everytime I hear this song I instinctavely look round my shoulder to check for any onrushing hen parties. To be fair though, the song could have been officially the most annoying song of all time in the wrong hands, but in the end it's actually quite enjoyable bubblegum pop. Ok yes, it's still a bit annoying...
12:04 'When You Were Mine' is rubbish. Yes, I know that it was never going to have much of a chance, but they've taken a strange and spikey new wave pop song and liberally spunked Magic FM juice all over the production desk. Even Cyndi Lauper herself sounds almost disinterested at times (well, by her standards anyway, which is 'feverishly excited' to most people)
13:15 Ewwwwwwwww, whispered outro. Didn't the Geneva Convention define them as a justifiable act of war in 1998?
14:44 'Time After Time' now?? Well this is just hit after hit isn't it? Well, right up until the end of this song and I realise that I don't know any more Cyndi Lauper songs.
15:56 It's a nice little song though isn't it? No-one's pretending that it's 'Marquee Moon', but it may dull that constant hankering for self-obliteration for four minutes or so
17:31 Another whispered outro!!! One more of those and I'm writing to my MP
20:38 'She Bop', as the so-Cyndi-Lauper-you'd-probably-presume-she-was-taking-the-piss-is-you-chose-to-invest-her-with-that-kind-of-self-awareness title suggests, is pretty silly but enjoyable stuff
23:51 The synth solo at the end of 'All Through the Night' veers past annoying and into nauseating, but the rest of the song is a pretty expertly crafted mid-tempo pop ballad, one you'd imagine absolutely despising after the radio plays it 16 times an hour for about two months
28:17 It was actually the law during the mid-80s that every succesful pop album required at least one song that could be feasibly described as 'reggae-tinged' or as having 'a Caribbean flavour', hence 'Witness'
33:11 'I'll Kiss You, with its synth squelches, synthesised slap bass and lyrics about visiting Gypsies, probably sounded dated back in 1983. This kind of production was probably killed off by the advent of the Nintendo Entertainment System
35:09 'He's So Unusual', despite being just a 45 second music hall pastiche, almost made a smile break across the craggy facade that was once my face. No mean achievement.
38:04 'Yeah Yeah' is a slight train wreck of saxaphone solos, squeals and comedy Japanese voices which, admirably, Lauper's strength of personality manages to just about save from being an absolute embarrassment. And that's all folks!
A pretty much perfect example of 80s pop all told, there's nothing in it's 10 tracks you'd describe as filler, almost each and every track has you unintentionally humming along by the second chorus and when you learn that the first six tracks were released as singles those humungous sales start to make a lot of sense. I still wouldn't describe any of the tracks as classics, or even particularly great, but even on the songs that may have turned out to be absolute stinkers the power of Lauper's personality just about manages to carry them over the finish line. Will I listen to i again? Intentionally? I doubt it, but it was 38 minutes of unpretentious fun that didn't at any point make me want to stick needles in my eyeballs. A success, of sorts...
C
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