Songoftheday 4/4/14 - Here we are hanging on the strains of greed and blues, break the chain and we break down ...


Cyndi Lauper - "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough"
from the album The Goonies (Original Soundtrack) (1985)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #10 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 9

Today's Song of the Day is by the quirky pop singer Cyndi Lauper, whose debut album She's So Unusual spun off five top-40 hits in the U.S., including her breakthrough #2 single "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" and her chart-topping ballad "Time After Time". She became one of MTV's brightest stars, winning the first music award for Best Female Video, and also nabbed the award for Best New Artist at the 1985 Grammys. Cyndi also had a featured role in the mega-A-list charity single "We Are The World" from USA for Africa, and embarked on a massive tour.

In that period she took time to record a song for the Steven Spielberg production company Amblin's fantasy/comedy movie The Goonies, and "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough", as light of a single as you could get (co-written with Stephen Lunt and Arthur Stead), nevertheless had probably the most elaborate of music videos I've ever seen outside of "Thriller". With two extended parts, featuring not only Cyndi and her usual sidekicks of then-boyfriend David Wolff, wrestler "Captain" Lou Albano, and her real-life mother, the video included the child cast of the movie, the then-unknown Bangles as pirates, and an assortment of wrestling stars including then-teen-crushes of mine Roddy Piper and Nikolai Volkoff, along with the Iron Sheik, Wendi Richter, and even Spielberg himself shows up at the end of part 1...


"The Goonies 'R' Good Enough" (the studio made her include the movie name in the title) became Lauper's fifth top-10 pop hit in America in July of 1985, while making the top-10 in both Australia and Canada.

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The second half of the video was just as epic as the first - I forgot how enraptured I was of this when it was unrolled on MTV...


Here's Cyndi in her Grammy-nominated live set in Paris with the song...


She brought the song back by fan demand in 2011...


 ...and again from her New York concert from last year...


Pop-punk band New Found Glory tackled the song in 2000...


...and just because...


Up tomorrow: an Englishman covers some Philly soul for a #1 hit.

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