Shoulda been huge: Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Into the Nightlife’

Cyndi Lauper has been a friend of the gays longtime – the True Colors Fund, which she co-founded, does great LGBT advocacy work in the States – so in a way, it’s strange she didn’t get round to releasing a Big Gay Dance Album until 2008.

Cyndi, of course, prides herself on being so unusual, so when she did decide to dive into dancier waters, she didn’t just call up the Freemasons and have them remix Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Instead, she assembled a motley crew of collaborators including Basement Jaxx, Dragonette and Axwell and made a diverse, vital electro-pop-house album inspired by nights out with Alan Cumming in Noo Yoik City (as she would say it) while they were doing a Broadway show together in 2006. Incredible.

Bring Ya To The Brink is a very good album, often brilliant actually, but the jewel in its crown is the lead single, Into the Nightlife, which Lauper co-wrote with a trio of Swedish hit makers including Max Martin. It’s a song that captures all the tingling urgency of a night out on the gay scene from its very opening line: “Got this endless itch to ride / Into the night…”

Right from that first verse, Into the Nighlife feels like it’s about to go off and then, after a synth riff that churns like a nervous twink’s stomach, it really does. “I’ll take you till you’re all spun up,” Lauper sings on a chorus that hits you like a Jägerbomb – though she later confessed on The Graham Norton Show that her teenage son thought she was singing “I’ll take you till your balls hang out”. LOLZ etc.

Incredibly, the chorus may not be the best thing about Into the Nightlife – giving it stiff competition is Cyndi’s lusty refrain of “shirtless wonders… wreck my sight”. Seriously, what a lyric.

Released in August 2008, Into the Nightlife did very little chart-wise, peaking at number 82 in Australia and number 168 (ouch) in the UK. It did, however, reach number one on the US Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart – I wonder which clubs were giving it such heavy rotation?

Watch the video below, in which Cyndi comes off like a cross between Robyn and a wacky art teacher after one too many white wine spritzers.

[youtube height=”HEIGHT” width=”WIDTH”]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5UCUusl9jo[/youtube]

We love you, Cyndi.

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