![]() At the end of the trial, the judge said, “Let the canary sing.” But she was sued by her previous manager and had to go to court (and go bankrupt) to be free of him. (They’d come along a little too late to be new wave, a little too early to be post-new wave.) People kept telling Cyndi that she should go solo, and after Wolff became her manager, it happened. Lauper’s presence onstage, from the clips we see, was volcanic, but success bypassed the band. Blue Angel sounded like they wanted to be Blondie, and they had a few songs, like the single “I’m Going to Be Strong,” that really kicked. I confess that I never knew this part of the story, and it’s a revelation. It was in 1980 that she joined the band Blue Angel as lead singer, and we start to hear the blasting operatic power of her voice. We hear a live recording from the period when she was imitating Janis Joplin (startlingly well), which at one point blew out her vocal cords. Cyndi herself was a wild weed, and in that atmosphere of tolerance she began to bloom.Īt first, Lauper played in cover bands. She left home at 17, going to live with Ellen, who was gay and open about her sexuality. But by the time her family moved to Queens, her parents were divorced and she had an abusive stepfather. Catching Patsy Cline on “The Arthur Godfrey Show” was big for her. In her family’s cold-water flat in Brooklyn, she grew up watching “Queen for a Day” on TV and also the Beatles, who we see priceless footage of her and her sister, Ellen, impersonating. The movie traces the more than 10 years she spent working away at it. Lauper, born into a boisterous Sicilian family in 1953, was 30 years old by the time she made it big, yet she knew from a young age that she wanted to be a singer. ![]() “Let the Canary Sing” is satisfying when it focuses on Lauper’s music and her ragamuffin-street-kook persona, but you feel like you’re getting the super-bite-size version of Cyndi Lauper’s life.įor its first 50 minutes or so, the film is terrific. But within the school of documentary-as-image-polishing, they revealed a great deal about who these stars are as human beings. In recent years, there have been a number of streaming documentaries about pop stars, like “Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry,” “Pink: All I Know So Far,” “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” and “Jagged” (about Alanis Morissette), that were certainly controlled and protective, to the point that some critics (though not me) accused them of being hagiographic. That said, the portrait of Lauper that emerges from “Let the Canary Sing” doesn’t just feel meticulously laudatory and controlled it feels oddly minimal. The film sketches in aspects of Lauper’s biography, like the romantic relationship she had with David Wolff, who was her manager through the glory days, as well as her ardent LGBTQ activism, starting with her presentation of “True Colors,” in 1986, as an anthem for the gay community when it was being ravaged by AIDS. I can’t say, for sure, what “larger story” I was looking for. Yet it’s sort of an idiosyncratic movie, because that’s all it does. When you disrupt and define the pop landscape as thoroughly as Lauper did, there’s going to a be a certain drama to the story of how your music and your creative life force came into focus, and “Let the Canary Sing” does an excellent job of tracing how Cyndi Lauper came to be…Cyndi Lauper. When she first launched into orbit in 1983, Cyndi Lauper was such a powerful singer, so brazenly anthemic in her joy and attack, with such a head-turning new image (the punk cockatoo hair, the frosted kewpie-doll-meets-Sid Vicious lip pucker, the stylized Brooklyn street-urchin voice, the thrift-shop layers of dresses and earrings and bangles and fishnets, and the way that she’d contort her body, as if she were in too much ecstasy to worry about which direction her limbs were pointing) that she seemed at once totally outside the box and utterly inevitable.
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