I’ve had The Cyndi Lauper Beat Tape for a little while now but I’m still glad to be able to bring it to you. 100 Acres revisited Cyndi Lauper’s classic She’s So Unusual LP for an up to date instrumental reworking.

Snippets of the Cyndi Lauper original are generously included at the end of each track, but what got me was the snippet for “Unusual”. Instead of including Lauper’s cover of the Helen Kane classic “He’s So Unusual”, 100 Acres gets in a clever and well placed snippet of the Helen Kane original.

Other standouts for me include “Gimme, Gimme” which features a sliver of a vocal sample from Lauper, the cleverly titled “Informer Fi Dead” and “BOP (Jungle Cheese)” where a lot of liberties were taken with “Shebop” that strayed far from the original. By the way it was years before I knew what that song was about!

And oh yeah the refreshing take on “Time” stood out because you have to kill it on “Time After Time”, arguably Cyndi Lauper’s greatest song. “Time” is consistent with the rest of The Cyndi Lauper Beat Tape yet still manages a vague faithfulness to the original.

Artist statement: In regards to my latest project The Cyndi Lauper Beat Tape. I went back to her best piece of work to date, She’s So Unusual LP, and chopped, twisted,sped up, sped down pieces of each song reconstructing my interpretation of the album into a neck snappin’ beat tape format”.

If you don’t know who Helen Kane is she was the singer/actress that was straight jacked by Hollywood execs when the cartoon character Betty Boop was based on her. They took her whole likeness, she got no money off of it and now Boop is better known than she is. It sucks that execs are still doing stuff like this, just ask Dres formerly of Black Sheep. [1]

Here’s Cyndi Lauper herself singing the Helen Kane classic “He’s So Unusual”, a song perfectly suited for her New Yawk accent.

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