It happened in January 2022, when Cindy Lauper He was around 68 years old and ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ It reached the historic and not insignificant figure of one billion views on YouTube. «Many people do not realize that it is … a political song. “When I put my feminist hands on it, I knew that I wanted to turn it into an anthem for all women,” the New York singer said then to explain what she did to Robert Hazard’s original and, in a way, what that stratospheric success did to her. his career.
Because almost overnight, in the blink of an eye, Cindy Lauper went from bankruptcy, Led Zeppelin and Joni Mitchell covers, and gigs in seedy bars to the top of the American and British charts. She to rub shoulders with Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen in that shower of stars that was ‘We are the world’ and to compete with Madonna in the turnstiles of access to the pop Olympus. In her favor, a practically unique vocal register, like a yodel singer crossed by a high tension cable, and an eccentric and colorful image to match her extravagant and energetic pop.
Years before, Lauper had already had a brief brush with fame when Blue Angel, the band she shared with John Turi, signed with Polydor and went number one… in Holland!, but ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ had to come, preview of what would be their debut album ‘She’s so unusual’ (1984), so that the American singer became a phenomenon of global reach. The song, an elastic and adhesive pop torpedo, soon became an anthem for “bored teenagers and young feminists”, as the press of the time celebrated, and a recurring refrain, a billion and counting, with each change of decade. .
The singer, during the presentation of the documentary ‘Let the canary sign’ at the beginning of the year
REUTERS
It is normal that, when it came to naming the farewell tour that she announced this week and that will take her to the United States between October and December 2024, the performer did not even hesitate: ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour’ and pop as aesthetic relief, as synonymous with liberation. Like a canary in the mine of what was to come. Namely: beads enough to supply a flea market, multicolored hair, contagiously jovial eccentricity. The then emerging MTV as a launching pad and its image as a blank canvas to be drawn in the shape of a star. “When I first became famous, I felt like everyone just came and took it all in. The jewelry, the color, the corsets on the outside… everything,” Lauper recalled on Tuesday in an interview with ‘The New York Times’.
Biographical documentary
The New Yorker’s swan song comes after a long decade away from big tours and eight years after ‘Detour’, an album of country & western covers. The novelty, in this case, puts it ‘Let the canary sing’, biographical documentary that reviews a career that promised joy and fun and in the end has had a little bit of everything. Lights, shadows and first-time Grammys like the one she won in 1985 for ‘ella She’s so unusual’, an album also crowned by ‘Time after time’, Prince’s ‘When you were mine’, and ‘She bop’, song fiercely attacked by the American ultra-Catholic right for supposedly promoting female masturbation.
In full swing, and as much as the producers initially wanted Madonna, Lauper was one of the star signings of the big night of pop. ‘We are the world’, where, with Dylan’s permission, she starred in another of the evening’s unintentionally comic moments by making the sound technicians crazy with her trousseau of necklaces, bracelets and earrings jingling like a walking Christmas tree. None of her subsequent albums had as lasting an impact as her debut, although ‘True Colors’ and ‘A Night to Remember’ recorded good numbers and Lauper ended her eighties as a feminist icon and pop activist.
Born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised in Queens, she grew up rehearsing the Beatles’ vocal harmonies with her sister and worked as a painter, shoe saleswoman, waitress, and singer for obscure cover bands like Flyer. She lost her voice, ran into an unscrupulous manager, and was reborn as a star when she turned thirty. «I had to fight to write my entire life. Usually, women with big voices sang other people’s songs. “That was always a struggle,” she said upon entering the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015.
The cinema had less luck: although Steven Spielberg called her to participate in the soundtrack of ‘The Goonies’ and the success of ‘Girls just wanna have fun’ inspired a film starring Sarah Jessica Parker (and in which she refused to have her song used), critics were relentless with her performance in ‘The Secret of the Golden Pyramid’ . She didn’t have much desire to repeat and she rejected roles in ‘Steel Magnolias’ and ‘Woman’s Weapons’, but she got even years later when she won an Emmy for her role in the series ‘Crazy for You’.
In recent years, Lauper has combined the release of themed albums dedicated to the blues with musical theater, appearances on Broadway, and performances with confessed fans such as singer Nicki Minaj. She has won a Tony for the music of ‘Kinky Boots’, participated as an actress in ‘The Threepenny Opera’, by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and has multiplied her activism by creating foundations such as True Colors, aimed at helping people. homeless, and boosting the fund Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights. A life worth telling and singing that Alison Ellwood has turned into a film and whose title refers to what a judge told her in the early eighties, when she ended up litigating with her former manager and the magistrate took her side with a mallet blow «Let the canary sign (que cante el canario)«, said. And until now.
