She's So Unusual
She's so Unusual is the debut album by US singer Cyndi Lauper. The album marked her commercial breakthrough as a solo artist. The music magazine Rolling Stone lists it at number 487 on its list of the 500 best albums of all time. Four of the singles became top ten hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and the album, produced by William Wittman, has sold nine million copies in the US alone.
Title List
- Money Changes Everything (Tom Gray) - 5:06
- Girls Just Want to Have Fun (Robert Hazard) - 3:58
- When You Were Mine (Prince) - 5:06
- Time After Time (Rob Hyman, Lauper) - 4:03
- She Bop (Rick Chertoff, Gary Corbett, Lauper, Stephen Broughton Lunt) - 3:51
- All Through the Night (Jules Shear) - 4:33
- Witness (Lauper, John Turi) - 3:40
- I'll Kiss You (Lauper, Shear) - 4:12
- He's so Unusual (Al Sherman, Al Lewis, Abner Silver) - 0:45
- Yeah Yeah (Hasse Huss, Mikael Rickfors) - 3:18
Reception
In the Rough Guide to Rock, the album is described as a "crazy mix of energetic pop and thoughtful ballads" and the hit single Girls Just Want to Have Fun as an "anthem for bored teenagers and young feminists". Kurt Loder of Rolling Stone music magazine, in a contemporary review, considered Cyndi Lauper one of the best "junk rock" singers since Maureen Gray, comparing her voice to girl pop of the pre-Beatles era. In his review, he faults Witness and He's so Unusual for being songs on the album that didn't belong there. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic called the album a "madcap mix of self-awareness, ebullient pop music, unabashed sentimentality, subversiveness and intelligent humour". Slant Magazine stated that it was the balance between kitsch and sincerity that made this album a classic and voted it among the "50 most important pop albums" in 2003.
