Peak
2
Weeks
25
Score
4,104
Chart Year
1984
The release of the single was accompanied by a quirky music video. It cost less than $35,000, largely due to a volunteer cast and the free loan of the most sophisticated video equipment available at the time. The cast included professional wrestling manager "Captain" Lou Albano in the role of Lauper's father while her real mother, Catrine, played herself. Lauper later appeared in World Wrestling Federation storylines opposite Albano and guest-starred in an episode of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, in which Albano portrayed Mario (Albano also played himself in the episode). This collaboration was the catalyst for the "Rock 'n' Wrestling" connection that lasted for the following two years. Lauper's attorney, Elliot Hoffman, appeared as her uptight dancing partner. Also in the cast were Lauper's manager, David Wolf, her brother, Butch Lauper, fellow musician Steve Forbert, and a bevy of secretaries borrowed from Portrait/CBS, Lauper's record label. A clip of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is featured as Lauper watches it on television. Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels, another of Hoffman's clients, agreed to give Lauper free run of his brand new million-dollar digital editing equipment, with which she and her producer created several first-time-ever computer-generated images of Lauper dancing with her buttoned-up lawyer, leading the entire cast in a snake-dance through New York streets and ending up in Lauper's bedroom in her home. The bedroom scene is an homage to the famous stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers' film A Night at the Opera. "The year 1983 makes a watershed in the history of female-address video. It is the year that certain issues and representations began to gain saliency and the textual strategies of female address began to coalesce." In the video, Lauper wanted to show in a more fun and light-hearted manner that girls want the same equality and recognition boys had in society.[21] Before the song starts, the beginning of her version of "He's So Unusual" plays. The music video was directed by Edd Griles. The producer was Ken Walz while the cinematographer was Francis Kenny. The treatment for the video was co-written by Griles, Walz, and Lauper. The video was shot in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in summer 1983 and premiered on television in December 1983.[22] The choreography was by a New York dance and music troupe called XXY featuring Mary Ellen Strom, Cyndi Lee and Pierce Turner. The music video officially crossed one billion views on YouTube in January 2022
This was Cyndi Lauper's first single as a solo artist. She released an album in 1981 as a member of the group Blue Angel, but "Girls Just Want To Have Fun" made her famous. The song was a huge part of '80s culture. It became an anthem for female attitude and set fashion trends as the video showed Lauper wearing bright, outrageous clothes that looked like they came from a thrift store (they often did). It set the stage for artists like Madonna: independent women wearing cheap, yet fashionable clothes with a taste for garish accessories. Lauper co-wrote many of her own songs, but not this one. Like "I Will Survive," it's a girl power song written by a man. A Philadelphia singer/songwriter named Robert Hazard, who had a band called Robert Hazard and the Heroes, wrote it. Hazard recorded his demo of the song in 1979. Speaking with Rolling Stone, Lauper said that she had to alter the lyrics from Hazard's original. "It was originally about how fortunate he was 'cause he was a guy around these girls that wanted to have 'fun' - with him - down there, which we do not speak lest we go blind," she said. A year before this song hit for Lauper, it was Hazard who was on the charts with his song "Escalator Of Life," which made #58 in the US. Yes, the video is on YouTube. The video, which ran constantly on MTV, features the wrestler Captain Lou Albano as Lauper's father, and also Lauper's real-life mother, who had no acting experience but did just fine. It won the first ever award for Best Female Video at the 1984 MTV Video Music Awards. Albano was also in her next video, "Time After Time." Both videos were directed by Edd Griles, who produced the first two MTV Video Music Awards. Lauper didn't want to record this song, but her producer, Rick Chertoff, was convinced it could become her anthem. The challenge for Lauper was figuring out how to sing it. She ended up doing her vocal in the style of the '50s hit "Let the Good Times Roll" by Shirley & Lee, which Shirley Goodman sings in a high-pitched voice. A theme in Lauper's work, evinced in her song "True Colors," is acceptance. Most of the women seen on MTV were the kind of beautiful people rarely seen in the real world, but Lauper made sure that her video was populated with regular folks doing their thing. In the book I Want My MTV, she explained: "I wanted 'Girls Just Want To Have Fun' to be an anthem for women around the world - and I mean all women - and a sustaining message that we are powerful human beings. I made sure that when a woman saw the video, she would see herself represented, whether she was thin or heavy, glamorous or not, and whatever race she was." Key contributors to this track were Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman of The Hooters, who worked closely with producer Rick Chertoff to craft the album. The three had been in a band together, and when Bazilian and Hyman formed The Hooters, Chertoff ended up at Columbia Records as a staff producer. Columbia had just signed Lauper and assigned her to Chertoff, who called in Bazilian and Hyman to work on it. This was a great combination - Bazilian and Hyman got on very well with Lauper and knew how to handle Chertoff, who could be very exacting. Bazilian and Hyman both played on this song and did the arrangements. Musically, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" was modeled on another '80s pop classic: "Come On Eileen" by Dexys Midnight Runners. Lauper and her team tried recording it in a few different styles, but nothing was working. One day, they were talking about "Come On Eileen" (a big hit in the summer of 1983 when they were recording the album) and Lauper suggested they try it in that style. "I turned down the tempo knob on the drum machine, programmed in the same kick drum pattern as 'Come on Eileen,' clicked on my guitar, and played that guitar riff," Eric Bazilian said in the book Skaboom!. "She started singing, and that was it." Ellie Greenwich sang backup vocals on this song and helped come up with the distinctive counterpoint. Greenwich was a legendary songwriter who worked with Phil Spector on many classic songs of the '60s, including Be My Baby and Leader Of The Pack. Other songs she sang on include "Evil Woman" by Electric Light Orchestra and "Dreamin'" by Blondie. This song has been used in numerous TV shows and commercials. One of the more successful uses was in the 1995 movie Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone. It was Silverstone's first big role after playing a vixen in some Aerosmith videos, and helped establish her as a legitimate actress. Other movie uses: To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) Riding in Cars with Boys (2001) I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007) Baby Mama (2008) TV series: Magnum P.I. ("Say Hello To Your Past" - 2020) Supergirl ("Fight Or Flight" - 2015) The Office ("Lice" - 2013) - sung by Jenna Fischer and Kate Flannery Two And A Half Men ("Mr. Hose Says 'Yes'" - 2012) Glee ("I Kissed A Girl" - 2011) Bones ("The Wannabe In The Weeds" - 2008) Damages ("Tastes Like A Ho-Ho" - 2007) Gilmore Girls ("Like Mother, Like Daughter" - 2001) The Simpsons ("Lisa's First Word" - 1992) Charles In Charge ("Slumber Party" - 1984) Miami Vice ("Brother's Keeper" - 1984) It also features in the 2004 TV special Friends: The One Before the Last One - Ten Years of Friends. It didn't take long for the title of this song to get its own movie. In 1985, the unknown actresses Sarah Jessica Parker, Helen Hunt and Shannen Doherty starred in the film Girls Just Want To Have Fun, where the song was also used. Weird Al Yankovic wrote a parody of this for his 1985 album Dare To Be Stupid called "Girls Just Want To Have Lunch." He wasn't keen on doing anything that would make fun of women, but his label insisted he do a Cyndi Lauper send-up because this song was so popular. Lauper thought Yankovic's parody was funny. She said during a Reddit AMA: "I like Weird Al. I LOVED 'Like a Surgeon.' I thought he was going to make MORE fun of Girls just wanna have lunch. But it wasn't hard. Because everybody thought I was an alien, I spoke funny and I dressed funny... Not hard to make fun of." Based on the success of this song, Lauper became part of "The Rock and Wrestling Connection." She appeared at matches for the World Wrestling Federation and managed the women's champion, Wendi Richter. The song has charted on the Hot 100 on three other occasions following its initial entry in 1983. Cyndi Lauper remade it as "Hey Now (Girls Just Want to Have Fun)," peaking at #87 in 1995. Sixteen years later, the cast of Glee took its version to #59. Finally, in 2015 The Voice contestant Madi Davis reached #98 with her ethereal cover after she performed it on the TV show. When all of the party guests in the video are shown falling out of the bedroom in a pile when the door is opened, it was a tribute to a similar scene from the classic Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. In 2004, Carnival Cruise Lines used this in a series of commercials. >>
I come home in the morning light My mother says, "When you gonna live your life right?" Oh, mother dear, we're not the fortunate ones And girls they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have fun The phone rings in the middle of the night My father yells, "What you gonna do with your life?" Oh, daddy dear, you know you're still number one But girls they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have That's all they really want Some fun When the working day is done Oh, girls, they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have fun (Girls they want, wanna have fun) (Girls wanna have) Some boys take a beautiful girl And hide her away from the rest of the world I wanna be the one to walk in the sun Oh, girls they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have That's all they really want Is some fun When the working day is done Oh, girls, they wanna have fun Oh, girls just wanna have fun (Girls they want, wanna have fun) (Girls wanna have) They just wanna, they just wanna (girls) They just wanna, they just wanna (girls just wanna have fun) Oh, girls, girls just wanna have fun (They just wanna, they just wanna) They just wanna, they just wanna (girls) They just wanna, they just wanna (girls just wanna have fun) Oh, girls, girls just wanna have fun When the workin' When the workin' day is done Oh, when the workin' day is done Oh, girls, girls just wanna have fun Everybody, ha, ha They just wanna, they just wanna (girls) They just wanna, they just wanna (girls just wanna have fun) Oh, girls, yeah, girls just wanna have fun (They just wanna, they just wanna) When the workin' When the workin' day is done, oh (they just wanna, they just wanna) When the workin' day is done (girls) (Girls just wanna have fun) Oh, girl, girls just wanna have fun (They just wanna, they just wanna) Everybody now Yeah, yeah, yeah (They just wanna, they just wanna) Yeah, yeah Girls
| Week | Chart Date | Position | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dec 17, 1983 | 80 | 46 |
| 2 | Dec 24, 1983 | 69 | 57 |
| 3 | Dec 31, 1983 | 69 | 57 |
| 4 | Jan 7, 1984 | 62 | 64 |
| 5 | Jan 14, 1984 | 56 | 70 |
| 6 | Jan 21, 1984 | 45 | 81 |
| 7 | Jan 28, 1984 | 31 | 95 |
| 8 | Feb 4, 1984 | 21 | 105 |
| 9 | Feb 11, 1984 | 15 | 111 |
| 10 | Feb 18, 1984 | 9 | 117 |
| 11 | Feb 25, 1984 | 4 | 122 |
| 12 | Mar 3, 1984 | 3 | 123 |
| 13 | Mar 10, 1984 | 2 | 124 |
| 14 | Mar 17, 1984 | 2 | 124 |
| 15 | Mar 24, 1984 | 3 | 123 |
| 16 | Mar 31, 1984 | 5 | 121 |
| 17 | Apr 7, 1984 | 9 | 117 |
| 18 | Apr 14, 1984 | 11 | 115 |
| 19 | Apr 21, 1984 | 17 | 109 |
| 20 | Apr 28, 1984 | 33 | 93 |