I'll be, like, grocery shopping or doing something totally mundane, and once a day, you'll hear a Cyndi Lauper song on the radio. It is astounding what an icon she is, not just in popular music but in popular culture.
I think there's a weird self-affirmation thing that happens in popular music in general. It seems like every song I hear on the radio is like, "Listen to me roar!" or "This is my fight song!"
For me, the '80s was great because you had Boy George, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper. No one put boxes saying this is urban, this is popular, this is underground. It was just good or bad.
I am trying to encourage kids to do something that isn’t yet on their mind because it is not in popular culture. Popular culture tells you 'music, music, sports, sports.' It neglects the importance of a STEM education.
I do like people who are popular across the years and stuff like that, but I'm not a big pop music fan. I don't listen to the radio unless it's KCRW, like Booka Shade. Yeah, like weird music is what I'm really into right now. But I like anything really. There's just so much. I buy new music almost every day, so there's so much coming in that I don't even have time to listen to something more that twice.
I don't hear any of the popular stuff unless it's good 'cause I pay no attention to popular culture, at all.
It is fashionable to scoff at Americans, but they routinely produce most of the important and ground-breaking entertainment in the world. 'Popular culture' is still culture, Shakespeare was once as popular as any of today's icons with the common people.
My background is that I've spent a lot of time marketing entertainment. One of the old saws in package goods is you can take something that is popular and you can make it more popular. But if you take something less popular, you can't automatically market it into the same success as something that's already popular.
I was on stage with Cyndi Lauper, and my trousers split. It seemed like she was going to sing for ever.
In popular culture, when women compete, it's usually over a man, and it's usually very nasty. And that is just frankly not my experience. That's just some kind of popular mythology, it feels like. I find it insulting.
I don't want to be subsumed into popular culture and played on the radio next to some garbage music.
Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.
I get my inspiration for my songs and the lyrics from experiences in my life, but I'm also very inspired by the Beatles and Cyndi Lauper, as I really like their music.
I'm trying to fuse popular and commercial music and just make very creative music. It's popular music: it's everything for everybody.
I suppose I do the Japanese because I just don't know China. Chinese popular culture has never evoked that instant of, "Whoah! What's that?" that I have with Japanese popular culture.
Cyndi Lauper's 'Time After Time' was a perfect song. It was so beautiful and so heartfelt. Her vocals were so amazing. And, for me, that was a song I went to when I was feeling sad and wanted to feel even sadder.
I think this [Feels like Christmas] is one of the greatest, most unsung albums ever. It's Cyndi Lauper, and it's called Hat Full Of Stars. She's so underrated.