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Welcome back to Hit Parade, a podcast of Pop Chart History from Slate magazine, about the hits from

coast to coast.

I'm Chris Malanfi, chart analyst, pop critic, and writer of Slate's Why Is This Song Number

One series? On our last episode, we talked about the overlapping careers of rising 80s pop acts

Cindy Lauper, The Bangle's, and Amy Mann of Till Tuesday. By 1985, Laupper had scored a string of hits off her quadruple

platinum album. Till Tuesday had a huge single fueled by Mann's cinematic music video performance,

and the bangles were appearing in Cindy's videos and on her tour, but still looking for a hit of their own.

All of these artists now had to figure out their next moves without getting pushed around

by a meddling, often sexist music industry. Cindy Lopper had made some interesting friends in her rise to fame.

One of them accompanied her to the 1985 Grammy Awards,

where she won a major prize, Best New Artist.

When she went up to accept the prize,

she took along a muscle-bound man named Terry Balea, better known as Hulk Hogan.

And the best new artist is, oh, Cindy Lauper.

And all the World Wrestling Federation Captain Lou Albano who has gone on to become

a movie star and of course Katrina Dominique who starred in all the videos with me and a little

special thing. That's Hulk Hogan flexing behind the podium

next to Cindy. He was more than her bodyguard. In her first flush of stardom, Lopper was co-promoting

the World Wrestling Federation at every turn. In her

Girls Just Want to Have Fun video, her father was played by pro wrestler Captain Lou Albano.

Several more wrestlers made appearances in her Goonies Are Good Enough video. And when she premiered the Goonies clip on MTV,

...