Wednesday, October 8, 2008
(I actually wrote this in June of '08, and forgot about it until today.)
The lady, the legend
Cyndi Lauper is one of those songwriters that never seems to get half as much credit as she deserves. I had the LP of "She's So Unusual" growing up and, mirroring the experiences of lots of girls my age, it had a big effect on me. Cyndi Lauper represented something to girls that seemed real and tangible, unlike Madonna who was so hyper-sexualized and over the top that it was impossible to relate to her. As a kid I loved Madonna's music but I LOVED Cyndi Lauper the person, everything about her. She was scrappy, slightly strange, and just seemed to have something about her for quirky working class girls everywhere to look up to. I don't know about you guys but, at least in my neighborhood, we loved her for it. I even owned a VHS copy of her movie Vibes as a kid because I loved her so damned much.
Think about it: once you got older, did your breakups more resemble Cyndi's "ambivalently leaving my loving, slightly dirty boyfriend behind in our meager shared digs with only my sack full of records and hair dye in hand because I JUST HAVE TO BE FREE" in the video for "Time After Time" or Madonna's "things were going great until he became threatened by my budding modeling career and left me! So I quit, and then he taught me how to play pool!" in the video for "Borderline?" Case rested.
Anyway, I wrote ALL of this to show why I was so prepared, and almost insistent, on hating The Acorn's cover of "Goonies R' Good Enough."
More and more often I find that my exceptions to my "sacred artists to never be covered" rule (which includes Prince, Diane Cluck, and Joni Mitchell, to name a few) are always found in covers that seem to highlight the emotions behind the songs' lyrics moreso than even the originals do. I once heard a completely mind blowing live cover of Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You," for example, that slowly built tension before exploding at the end with an uncomfortably earnest, screaming vocal. While the original is a classic, I felt like the cover sounded like what the lyrics suggest, you know? I was comfortable with it because it made sense to me.
Because of it's upbeat sound, and being the theme to the Goonies movie, not too many people paid attention to the lyrics of "Good Enough." Neither did I, for a long time, but once I did I fell in appropriate love, with an all new kind of yearning. Maybe it was because I had to be older to really understand what the song talks about? Those are my dragons to slay, I suppose.
Either way, bravo to the Acorn for doing my girl right. I wonder what Cyndi thinks?
Posts
