Cyndi Lauper says label tried to pit her against Madonna

When Cyndi Lauper was preparing to release her debut album, 1983’s She’s So Unusual, songs from Madonna’s own first studio album, called simply Madonna, were already on the radio.

The record executives even wanted the “All Through the Night” singer to compete with Madge, according to a new interview that Lauper did with The Guardian. Lauper refused to turn her contemporary into a rival.

“As if you could only have one woman who is successful. What the hell is that about?” Lauper said. “That woman’s been entertaining us for years. She’s made great pop songs. I want to be competitive, but not pitted against another woman. I’m not into that.”

Sign up for Entertainment Weekly‘s free daily newsletter to get breaking TV news, exclusive first looks, recaps, reviews, interviews with your favorite stars, and more.

Even before that, Lauper said, they wanted her to be like Barbra Streisand. She pointed out that there had already been a Babs.

In February, Lionel Richie, another music star of the 1980s, said that he also compared Lauper and Madonna when he was inviting stars to sing on the charity single “We Are the World.” He ended up asking Lauper to sing, which she did, but he told Jimmy Kimmel in a scene from the 2024 documentary about it, The Greatest Night in Pop, that he regretted not asking Madonna to participate too.

“You couldn’t have both of them?” Kimmel said. “You guys made a mistake.”

Richie agreed.

“I’m going to say this now on national and international television: You’re right!” he said.

Lauper, the subject of the new documentary Let the Canary Sing, acknowledged in the new interview that fighting to keep from being transformed into something she wasn’t made her career less smooth than it might have been, but she wouldn’t change it.

“I don’t know what that path would have been,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer said. “It might have been easier for a while, but I wanted to learn. And, honestly, I just always wanted to be a great artist.”