by Hussain Khalid Feroze
Have you listened to the 80’s classic “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper? Well if you say you haven’t you probably just don’t remember it by name because that song plays absolutely everywhere. If after listening to it you still don’t remember ever hearing it then you’re welcome, I have just introduced you to one of the biggest songs of all time and one that I think is deceptively melancholic.
In “One Last Song” by Mike Ayers, musician Courtney Barnett talks about how the song she would want played at her funeral would be “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. The reasoning she gives is it sounds like the perfect way to end the night and so it would be her ideal way of ending her life. But it really got me thinking about how it’s actually quite a sad song. The song sounds really upbeat and on a first listen you may think anything other than the fact it’s sad but if you listen to the verses, it’s quite dark.
Well first of all, why is everyone coming after Cyndi for wanting to have fun? Second, I think about all the girls and people who are just lost in the dust because they are trapped in their lives in one way or another and they can’t have fun. What if you want to be the one to be at a party and have fun but not be the one to make it? Where do the people who don’t have the resources to make their fun go? The entire song is a battle cry for wanting to be free from society. Her mom and dad constantly ask her in the song when she’s gonna live her life right and what she’s gonna do with it, and she just says:
Oh momma dear, we’re not the fortunate ones
And girls, they wanna have fun.
Isn’t that kinda sad? I think it is. She’s not calling just herself unfortunate; she’s calling her entire circle unfortunate for having such a life. She’s talking about everyone, her parents included.
Funnily enough, I think this song proves Cyndi Lauper is a Marxist. In his essay “Wage-Labor and Capital” (1847), Karl Marx mainly argues that capitalism strips us away from real individual freedom and it makes us feel trapped and exploited. We’re not the fortunate ones like the capitalists who can keep on exploiting wage laborers and have fun in their lives. Even the fun we have in today’s world is structured by the very system that Marx criticizes.
In the music video, Lauper shows us how great her humor is. She has a flamboyant personality and extravagant mannerisms which often disguise the range and expressiveness of her voice. She is a brilliant clown who has the melodramatic power to suggest underlying sadness without breaking the rhythm of her clowning. “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is a remarkable song for the power with which it incarnates our collective dream about what a public space might be like. Apart from Bruce Springsteen’s music, the apartment life of the urban ethnic working class is wholly absent from the popular culture of the 1980s. Lauper’s space is shot in close up to emphasize its claustral feeling and suffocating warmth. She is shown to us as a working girl in conflict with her family, fighting to break out of her parents nagging and simultaneously break out of the lower class she and they are in. She does this by talking on the phone which her parents unsuccessfully stop her from doing and then by assembling an ethnically diverse group of girls who proceed to go dancing and singing through the streets of New York.
As we follow the song and dance, we discover the “fun” that is at issue here. The “fun” in many ways becomes its own character. It comes from the banter, flirtation, dresses, theatrics, extravagant gestures and stunning moves that are seen in the video. The pure heroine (she was previously unknown before the surprise hit) and her friends are not only starring in their own show, but, for a little while at least, become the authors of their own lives. But it is only in public that their show can go on. No other place is willing to host this protest. The protagonists must interact with strangers. Some will rise to play along with them or maybe even oppose them, while others will become their audience. They must learn to depend on these reactions to give their actions a shared meaning and to incorporate them into the public space.
As the girls dance through the streets, they find themselves among many construction workers. This is such a primal scene in the video and one I think the parents probably feared. But to our surprise and delight, the workers only smile and even more surprisingly some of them actually throw down their tools and join the dance. As Lauper’s parade goes on she reaches the neighborhood where she even attracts fellows of a higher class. Not only the girls but it appears that absolutely everybody can be accepted by this group and integrated into its dance. The video that once began in a normal kitchen sink has now metamorphosed into magical realism. These girls are not just transforming their lives, but the life of the street itself. Through its openness they bring radically different and polarized groups of people together. At the climax of the song and video, the heroine returns to her apartment with her new group of friends. Lauper brings her public life into her private space. Her parents find it horrifying but also kind of interesting. They are even tempted to join their child and change their own drab lives.
Why am I so obsessed with this? Because popular culture and especially as its told through music is worth paying attention to because of its power to dramatize our collective dreams. The dream that gets acted out in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” is a dream of bringing together our private and public lives, of uniting the rights of a citizen with the rights of a human. By fulfilling the first commandment of liberal individualism — Express Yourself, Have Fun — we can create a beloved community, a community so radiant in fact that even our parents will want in. Karl Marx would have recognized this utopian vision as the one he wrote about in his Communist Manifesto. A society in which “the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.”
Marx would have also admired Lauper’s sense of social reality. She ends the song with her own rendition of the Declaration of Rights: “Oh when the working day is done / Oh, girls just wanna have fun.” She knows that the pumpkin coach will turn into a subway train and that whatever magic happens on the street at night, she will have to go back to work in the morning. Still, even during the working day or perhaps especially then, she is determined to dream.