Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind And that’s what why we love her.(Can't remember when I last saw you laughing) For the last thirty years Lauper has banked on her formidable charisma and the enormous good will that She’s So Unusual still generates she’ll always have a constituency. A cover of Roy Orbison’s “I Drove All Night” became her last American top ten in 1989. MTV played a gunk-covered rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” (#12 peak) that boasts the kind of arrangement reaffirming what fools sniff about THE 1980’s. Second single “Change of Heart,” distinguished by a heavily distorted Nile Rodgers guitar riff and Bangles harmonies, peaked at #3 on career momentum. Released in a flurry of hype in the crowded 1986 holiday season, it peaked quickly in the top five and dutifully hung on for a few weeks before quietly sinking - a sensational collapse after She’s So Unusual‘s seventy-seven-week residency (True Colors is the moment for which the New Jersey Album was created). If so, why not get Roberta Flack, TV theme veteran, or somebody? What’s most discouraging about “True Colors” is the obviousness with which the performance undercuts the message: Cyndi Lauper stands revealed as another boring singer with adult contemporary ambitions, and that’s why we’re supposed to love her. It’s even below Steinberg-Kelly’s usual standards (they’d do much better with Divinyls and Chrissie Hynde a few years later) if they’d announced they’d written for the purpose of a Kodak commercial, no one would have blinked. Lauper and Lennie Petze’s production wraps the tune in damp Kleenex (Phil Collins’ 1998 cover, produced by Babyface, emulates its facelessness, a fact that’s almost inspiring). The goo-goo-ga-ga baby tone in which she chooses to perform goes down like warm pickle water. “True Colors” is colorless: a blank recording suitable for Bon Jovi or Whitney Houston.Ĭhained to a guitar arpeggio and a forlorn synthesizer, “True Colors” on the audience’s awareness of the star singing it. The shimmering discreet beauty of “Time After Time” did the same for Lauper in 1984, but when she hooked up with Madonna collaborators Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg two years later the horror was the degree to which she’d submitted to a bathos that was alien even to her kinship with the fallen and dispossessed. This encouraged her to write and record “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Live to Tell,” and those other I’ve-got-things-to-say mid-tempo stunners. It is true, however, that Madonna recorded “Crazy For You” as her first attempt to broaden her coalition beyond post-disco. The oft-told tale by a male-dominated press relates how Lauper and Madonna, who both released debuts in 1983, competed through the mid eighties, with Madonna losing the first battle but winning the war what “battle” and what “war,” I can’t imagine. Perhaps I’m too harsh in thinking she was supposed to record further examples of how money changes everything, not embody how money changes everything. A staid, safe, hedging-your-bets album, True Colors shreds every promise offered by She’s So Unusual it’s my vote for the most disappointing followup to a great album in rock history. When I disinterred the tape sometime in the nineties, surprise turned to shock. Listening to True Colors inspired nothing except surprise that the artist who’d recorded “She Bop,” “Time After Time,” “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” and the too long underrated The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” could have allowed herself to sound so wan. I had just rediscovered mainstream radio after the first of several periodic lacuna, so I used my Christmas dough to buy No Jacket Required and Licensed to Ill. Although a year old and well past its promotional cycle, True Colors was recorded by a figure known even to pop-allergic adults - a suitable gift. I learned this lesson sometime in late 1987 when a relative got me a cassette copy of Cyndi Lauper’s second album as a Christmas present. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.ĭisappointment and indifference are interchangeable. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. I don’t want to hate songs to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance.
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