Cyndi Lauper – Time After Time: The Best Of Cyndi Lauper (2000)

Cyndi Lauper began her career as a playful rebel, and matured into one of the best respected artists in American music. Lauper rose to fame in 1983 with the release of She's So Unusual, an album that provided an ideal showcase for her strong but girlish voice and her thrift-shop-genius personality. The album made her an overnight star and a darling of MTV, spawning two major hit singles ("Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and "Time After Time") and briefly making her a symbol of hip female empowerment on a par with Madonna. While Lauper wasn't truly a new wave artist, her multicolored hair, her eclectic fashion sense, and the implied inclusivity of her musical philosophy -- embracing elements of pop, reggae, funk, and dance music -- symbolized a free-thinking attitude that cleared a path between the underground and the mainstream. Lauper would never have another hit on the level of She's So Unusual, but with time her music matured as her persona evolved from a wacky street kid to a woman with ideas and the talent to make things of them. Her music remained eclectic, but with 1989's A Night to Remember and 1992's A Hat Full of Stars, she took greater control of her songwriting and explored serious themes that would have been outside her image a decade before. With 2003's At Last, Lauper showed she could tackle old standards in grand style, and by the 2010s she was a diva who could move from pop to blues (2010's Memphis Blues) and country (2016's Detour) with ease, even writing the songs for a successful stage musical.