Features

Cyndi Lauper Navigates Music, Activism And The Tides Of Stardom

by Peter Piatkowski

The title of Alison Ellwood’s new documentary Let The Canary Sing refers to a judge’s pithy comment when giving his judgment on a court case that saw Cyndi Lauper fight for her right to sing. She was vindicated after being chased by a former manager hoping to garnish some of her astonishing earnings after she hit it big as a solo pop star with her debut album, She’s So Unusual. The story is just one of many battles and obstacles the embattled songbird had to deal with on her journey.

For the uninitiated, Cyndi Lauper is a Brooklyn-born, Queens-raised chanteuse who found success in the spiky MTV musical landscape with an idiosyncratic collage of pop music and an eye-catching fashion sense, inspired and purloined from the legendary Village (check) vintage shop Screaming Mimi’s. Years before Patricia Field festooned Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, and America Ferrera in eccentric thrift, vintage, and couture blends, Cyndi Lauper pioneered a look that pulled in disparate fashion influences to create a cartoon-like aesthetic. That, coupled with her outrageous screen persona, sometimes hid a genuine musical talent and an astounding voice. As MTV became a major force and star maker in the music industry, Lauper seemed born for the decade. Artists like Annie Lennox, Boy George, Pete Burns, and Madonna played with image, selling a look and selling music.

Let the Canary Sing tells Lauper’s story in a fairly straightforward and largely chronological fashion. We get her troubled childhood, messy adolescence, young adulthood spent trying to find her way, and, finally, superstardom. But those familiar with Lauper’s trajectory know that the story doesn’t end with her fame. Like many artists of the 1980s, Lauper struggled to transcend the neon-sluiced times and found it difficult to translate her early success into a sustained career into the 1990s. So, Ellwood tells the story of a major pop star who has to contend with the trends and shifts in the fame landscape and create several subsequent careers while following the muses.

Amid the dizzying heights Lauper reached, one thing is clear: fame became a “thing.” “I think fame got in my way,” she suggests. “I hated it. I hated that I was labelled an icon; I hated that people thought that it was manufactured.” Lauper became tethered to the public persona she cultivated on her various talk shows and award show appearances. She had a garrulous wit that sounded goofy and cracked coming from that high-pitched honk of a voice, slathered with a Queens drawl. A genuine eccentric, Lauper seemed to operate from a world of her own, often befuddling genial talk show hosts like the perennially popular Johnny Carson, who seemed to regard her with both amusement and bemusement. Then there was the WWF stuff. Lauper was making lots of noise around her music, making it easy for the music to get lost.

In this respect, she was similar to another pop star who emerged around the same time, Madonna. Like Lauper, Madonna came out of the New York art scene (though Madonna was a Michigan transplant) and adopted a ragamuffin, thrift-shop aesthetic. Critics quickly pitted the two against each other, suggesting that Lauper’s superior vocal capabilities ensured that she would prove to have legs, while Madonna would be a flash—a charismatic, if mediocre, singer who relied on her sexiness. Of course, that story was sexist, reductive nonsense, and both women were far more complicated than that. In the film, Lauper ruefully acknowledges that their careers went in very different directions, admitting, “My journey was painful because my career just didn’t go like my peers. My career was up and down, up and down, up and down.” And that’s the ultimate story of Cyndi Lauper, as told by Ellwood. It’s a wildly gifted woman who is constantly climbing, constantly changing, constantly reinventing herself.  The film spotlights a weary Lauper whose success are hard-won. Nothing came easy to Lauper. Let The Canary Sings gives viewers a classic rags-to-riches story with Lauper growing up in a tumultuous household with an abusive stepfather. Once she could, she fled, joining her older sister and establishing a chosen family of gay men who helped raise the young, somewhat directionless Lauper. These men proved crucial in her life and would later serve as tragic inspirations for one of her biggest hits.

As the film continues to march towards her pop success, Ellwood laces the film with some incredible music. That’s the huge sell for the film’s soundtrack, available on CD [And reviewed here.] There have been several anthologies and compilations of Lauper's work, starting with the excellent Twelve Deadly Cyns… And Then Some (1994), followed by several attempts to encapsulate her odd career. She’s So Unusual is a near-perfect debut and is probably the most impactful entry in her varied discography, but the soundtrack to Let The Canary Sing is a significant mark above the other “greatest hits” because it doesn’t just collect Lauper’s biggest chart successes, but also tells her story in the best way possible: through her fantastic music.

A prevailing narrative that has followed Lauper for the past 10-15 years or so is that she’s one of the most underrated artists of her time. It seems impossible to mention her without highlighting just how underappreciated she is. We’re repeatedly reminded of her insightful songwriting and powerful singing. In one striking sequence, Billy Porter narrates an especially fiery and soulful duet between Lauper and Patti LaBelle as the two traded spirited verses on a passionate version of “Time After Time.” However, the perception of Lauper being underrated has stuck despite her talent being so obvious: what people are saying when they suggest that Lauper’s “underrated” is that she’s not as famous or popular as she should be.

Because even a glance at her most accessible work shows a startingly gifted performer, the film goes into the creative process of three of Lauper’s biggest and most enduring hits: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Time After Time,” and “True Colors.” Interestingly, the last song, her second number-one hit, was written by ’80s pop songwriting heavyweights Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, though Lauper’s warm and definitive interpretation of the song’s lyrics has blurred the borders of authorship.

The film does a fascinating deep dive into the origins and genesis of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” which is both career-defining for Lauper and also a fine, if slight, New Wave pop song written by Robert Hazard. When the song was suggested to Lauper, she balked, unhappy with the song’s male point of view. Instead, she reworked some of the lyrics, changing the tune into an anthem of female empowerment. One of the talking heads in the film, Boy George, a fellow veteran of ’80s Technicolor pop, praised the song’s new identity, saying, “[The song was] quite ahead of itself. When you think about when girl power came along, and here was this chick, in the early ’80s, going, ‘Yeah, girls want to go out and party, girls want to have fun.’ It was a good message for kids and teenage girls, particularly.” The song’s enduring popularity would reappear when protestors co-opted its message during the Women's March, declaring that “Girls just want to have FUN-damental rights.”

And it’s Lauper's activist leanings make for some of the most moving moments in Let The Canary Sing. A marked departure from the goofy cartoon character she built, Lauper’s feelings about social justice leave the biggest impression. When the film turns to “True Colors,” Lauper recounts recording the tune at the time she was watching her best friend die of AIDS. Like many survivors of the AIDS crisis, Lauper seems somewhat traumatized by her memories (her sister quickly dissolves into tears when talking about that time). “What I saw,” she said of the early days of AIDS, “was so bad and so unjust.”

The activism continues with her embrace of women’s rights and choice (particularly poignant given the overturning of Roe V. Wade). A striking image of Lauper at a choice rally, brandishing wire hangers, while declaring, “No more wire hangers!” segues into her song “Sally’s Pigeons,” a single from her 1993 album Hat Full Of Stars. Years removed from her salad days, Hat Full Of Stars was a way for the singer to address some weightier issues she was thinking about, including racism, domestic violence, incest, and abortion. “Sally’s Pigeons,” written with Mary Chapin Carpenter, was a sad story of a childhood friend who died from a botched abortion. Lauper re-recorded the song for the film in time for renewed activism as states throughout the US have enacted near-total bans on abortion.

Like many of these celebrity documentaries, we end the story with weary success. Lauper’s career after the 1980s took some dips, including a so-so acting career (though she’d win an Emmy for a guest turn on the NBC sitcom Mad About You) before finding new success as a musical theatre composer, winning a Tony for Kinky Boots. At the movie’s end, she's seen workshopping a new theatre project: a musical adaptation of another 1980s mainstay, the Mike Nichols comedy Working Girl.

The film does a lot of work to highlight Lauper as a toiler (her sister calls her a “technician”). Though not a famed instrumentalist, the background work that she and her co-writers do on classic tunes like “Time After Time” is impressive. It’s an interesting juxtaposition to the image of the zany lady palling around with wrestlers. As Lauper describes the writing process—particularly zeroing in on the song's ticking cadence resulting from Rob Hyman’s ticking watch—we see the singer light up: she’s in her element describing the genesis of this beloved tune.

We end Let The Canary Sing on a somewhat triumphant note, as Lauper’s career seems on yet another upswing with the work for Working Girl. We also see her in the recording studio working on a new version of “Sally’s Pigeons,” ruefully admitting that she now has to change the lyric from “two little girls in ponytails, some 21 years back” to “two little girls in ponytails, some 51 years back,” but she seems resigned.

While promoting Let The Canary Sing, Lauper also announced that she’s going on one final tour. Turning 70, Lauper still feels physically up to the challenge of touring, but the uncertainty of the future has prompted her to do one last concert hurrah while she knows she can. The career-spanning Let The Canary Sing is a fitting tribute to the end of an important chapter of her career as she looks forward to the future.