Cyndi Lauper

The so-unusual baby-skinned beauty.

Information: Cyndi Lauper
Suggested first purchase/best of: Time After Time--The Best of Cyndi Lauper
Suggested first album: She's So Unusual

The Great Cyndi Lauper (2003) -- An overwhelming Cyndi Lauper box set (43 songs on three discs), the bad thing about it is that you kind of have to be a true Cyndi Lauper nut to enjoy the entire thing and -- if you are -- you probably already have all these songs on albums. Folks who just like "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and stuff like that will get bored by disc two and a half. However, the three best single-disc collections out there now (Twelve Deadly Cyns... and Then Some, Time After Time: The Best of Cyndi Lauper, and The Essential Cyndi Lauper) have their own problems: mostly that pretty notable tracks are missing from each of them. This one, huge as it is, has everything, and in chronological order, which is nice. If nothing else, you can make your own single disc collection from this. (That's what I'm gonna do.) The other good thing about this collection is that it's cheap and costs the same as the single-disc collections; the only problem is finding it (since it's an Australian import). The other option, of course, is to just buy Cyndi's first three albums, since those are the ones she's most known by.