Tunes Du Jour Presents Cyndi Lauper

Start with the obvious entry point, because it’s still the right one: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” turned a Queens-born former waitress into an overnight pop fixture in 1983. The song had been written a few years earlier by Robert Hazard from a male point of view, with the unstated assumption that the girls in question wanted to have fun with him. Lauper changed that. With some lyric tweaks and a complete reorientation of attitude, she turned a guy’s come-on into something closer to a declaration of independence, and it became one of the era’s defining feminist anthems almost by sheer force of her delivery. Eleven years later she returned to the song again for “Hey Now (Girls Just Want to Have Fun),” reworking it with a reggae lilt — proof that she still had new ideas for a song many artists would have left alone after the first hit.

The voice underneath all of it was the real instrument. Four octaves, a Brooklyn rasp she never sanded down, and a willingness to bend a note until it nearly broke. “Time After Time” and “All Through the Night” show that same range doing tenderness as convincingly as anything more upbeat, which is part of why She’s So Unusual holds up. People who remember mainly the dyed hair and the thrift-store-meets-runway outfits she wore once she broke into the mainstream tend to undersell how much the singing was doing the actual work.

It’s also easy to forget that Lauper had been a working musician for years before any of that. Blue Angel, the band she fronted with John Turi from 1978 to 1982, mined late-fifties and early-sixties rock and roll with a new-wave edge — closer in spirit to early B-52’s than to anything she’d release solo. “I’m Gonna Be Strong,” “I Had a Love,” “Fade,” and “Late” come from that band’s one self-titled 1980 album, which sold so poorly that Lauper joked it “went lead” instead of gold; the band broke up soon after amid management trouble. She kept returning to that material for years afterward. “Witness,” a song that didn’t make Blue Angel’s original LP, got re-recorded for She’s So Unusual. “What a Thrill” became a solo track that turned up on the soundtrack to The Goonies. And “I’m Gonna Be Strong,” itself originally a Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil cover that Blue Angel had recorded, got another pass from Lauper for a solo greatest-hits collection. The line from that band to her solo career isn’t a clean break; it’s more like she kept pulling the same handful of songs through different rooms until they fit.

The mid-eighties run is where the range really shows, and not just musically. “She Bop” is breezy on its surface, and it’s fine to say plainly what it’s actually about: self-pleasure, sung with enough wit and bounce that it became a hit without anyone needing to spell it out. “Money Changes Everything” is a cover she made entirely her own, stretched out further on the extended live version. “True Colors” went a different direction completely — plain, direct, written as comfort for a friend — and has stayed in steady rotation as an anthem at Pride events and LGBTQ+ benefits in the decades since. “We Are the World” deserves a specific mention here: amid a chorus of the era’s biggest names, Lauper’s ad-libs and sheer vocal presence make her one of the most memorable voices on the record, which is no small feat given who else is standing in that room.

What ties a catalog this scattered together isn’t a sound so much as a sensibility. “Right Track, Wrong Train,” the b-side to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” and “Change of Heart,” from her second album, True Colors, sit comfortably next to covers like “What’s Going On” and “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” which reach back toward soul and pre-rock standards. Lauper never seemed to draw a hard line between her “serious” work and her “fun” work, between a soundtrack single and a feminist anthem, between a cover and something fully her own. That’s probably why all of it has aged so well together: it never pretended to be separate in the first place.

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Tunes Du Jour Presents 2015

“Uptown Funk” opened 2015 by daring the rest of pop music to be as fun, and not much else quite matched it on that front — Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars had assembled something so precisely calibrated to delight that it almost didn’t seem fair. From there the year spread out in several directions at once. Drake’s “Hotline Bling” turned a mid-tempo, vaguely melancholic R&B track into a cultural event largely on the strength of its own awkwardness. The Weeknd crossed into genuine ubiquity with “Can’t Feel My Face” — a song that managed to be both a mainstream smash and, lyrically, a fairly dark piece of work. And then there was Adele, who released “Hello” in October and promptly reminded everyone that a big voice and a big melody, executed without a trace of irony, can still stop a room. The song broke streaming records almost immediately and felt, in its very straightforwardness, like a rebuke to the year’s more studied cool.

If one artist owned 2015 critically, it was Kendrick Lamar. To Pimp a Butterfly arrived in March and immediately reoriented conversations about what rap could do structurally and politically. “King Kunta” was the album’s most visceral punch — confrontational, funky, and specific in its references in ways that rewarded close listening. Elsewhere in hip-hop, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” was one of the year’s most improbable success stories: a track rooted in trap music’s skeletal, skittering beats but softened by Fetty’s melodic looseness and a surprisingly affectionate lyrical premise. It peaked at number two on the Hot 100 and spent most of the year on the chart. Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money” drew from the same trap well but to a very different emotional effect — harder, more confrontational, and delivered with a precision that made the demand feel non-negotiable. Nicki Minaj, meanwhile, was doing something technically sharp on “Truffle Butter”: she announces early in her verse that she has a dozen flows, and then proceeds to demonstrate it, cycling through registers and tempos within a few bars in a way that most listeners registered as energy without necessarily clocking how much control it required.

Some of the year’s most durable music came from artists working at a slight remove from the mainstream. Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion became a critical darling almost in slow motion — “Run Away With Me” is the kind of opening track that makes you understand why people proselytize about a record. Tame Impala released Currents, and “Let It Happen” announced a shift toward synthesizers and a more expansive, unhurried sound that influenced a lot of what followed. Courtney Barnett’s “Pedestrian At Best” was wired and funny, running on nervous energy throughout. Grimes put out “Realiti” as a demo and it felt more fully realized than most finished records.

The year also had room for artists doing something closer to American roots music, though rarely in straightforward ways. Leon Bridges arrived with “Coming Home,” drawing on early soul so precisely that it occasionally felt like an exercise, but an extremely well-executed one. Alabama Shakes’ “Don’t Wanna Fight” was rawer and harder to categorize — Brittany Howard never let genre expectations dictate what she does, and her voice on that track does things that make those expectations feel beside the point. Father John Misty’s “Chateau Lobby #4” was a love song about his wife, filtered through deliberately bizarre imagery — satanic Christmas Eve, a wedding dress someone was probably murdered in — that somehow landed as genuinely romantic. Sufjan Stevens released Carrie & Lowell, and “Should Have Known Better” is among the most quietly devastating songs of the decade — it moves from grief into something that feels, carefully and without overselling it, like hope.

What holds this particular year together isn’t a unified sound but a productive restlessness. Run The Jewels brought Zack De La Rocha in for “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” and made something that sounded urgently necessary. Skepta’s “Shutdown” was a reminder that grime had been building momentum for years and was finally getting its due internationally. Missy Elliott, back after a long absence, sounded exactly like herself on “WTF (Where They From)” — which is to say, like nobody else. Thundercat’s “Them Changes” and Julia Holter’s “Feel You” pointed toward where adventurous R&B and jazz-adjacent pop would head over the next several years. EL VY — the side project of National frontman Matt Berninger — closed things out with a song whose title alone (“Return to the Moon (Political Song for Didi Bloome to Sing, with Crescendo)”) tells you something about the year’s appetite for work that didn’t feel the need to make things simple.

Dig into thirty of the best offerings from 2015.

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