By the point Cyndi Lauper broke out with “Women Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable,” she was greater than able to stroll within the solar. Lauper had launched her singing profession within the late Seventies as a part of Blue Angel, however the group’s 1980 debut album flopped and authorized points with their supervisor led her to file for chapter.
She took a wide range of odd jobs, together with ready tables at IHOP, earlier than touchdown a solo report deal and releasing She’s So Uncommon in October 1983. “Women Simply Wish to Have Enjoyable” nearly didn’t make the album: Lauper felt that the music, as written by Robert Hazard, emphasised ladies as sexual companions.
“It wasn’t proper for me,” Lauper informed THR earlier this yr. “It was written by a man, and he was writing, ‘Hey, we’re fortunate. They need to have enjoyable. Right here I’m.’ And it wasn’t that manner for me as a result of I’m a girl.”
She got here round after pushing for a Motown sound and tweaking the lyrics, which helped rebrand it as a proclamation that girls need to get pleasure from the identical pleasures as males. As her first single, “Women” entered the Billboard Sizzling 100 at No. 80 on Dec. 17. Its music video, that includes Lauper’s buddy and professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano enjoying her dad, helped usher the music to No. 2 on its option to turning into a generation-defining hit.
Says Alison Ellwood, director of the current Lauper documentary Let the Canary Sing: “Forty years later, ‘Women’ stays a feminist anthem, empowering women and girls to make use of their voices to problem assaults in opposition to their minds and bodily autonomy.”
Its video gained MTV’s inaugural greatest feminine video award in 1984.
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This story first appeared within the Dec. 7 problem of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.
