Cyndi Lauper is Still Having Fun

metroweekly.com:

Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir, which the pop superstar released in 2017. As she tells it, Lauper was especially distraught hearing stories in which her grandmother, her mother, and her aunt were each dissuaded or denied chances to pursue their individual dreams or opportunities — and all solely because of their gender. “I could never undo the wrong done…because of a ridiculous mentality that kept women back,” she wrote.What she could do was to commit herself to changing that narrative, and to not let similar limits get in her way, particularly when it came to pursuing a career in music.

Her drive was at least in part motivated by her mother, the Brooklyn-reared daughter of Catholic immigrants from Sicily.“My mom loved art and music so much,” Lauper continued, “but she wasn’t allowed to accept a scholarship to a high school for voice because, my grandparents said, ‘Only whores go to school in Manhattan.'”Naturally, given its cultural preeminence as the hub of America’s music industry, Cyndi Lauper would eventually make her way to Manhattan.

Yet it took her more than a decade after leaving her childhood home in Queens to finally find success in the industry. Notably, her major breakthrough as a solo artist tested her feminist resolve, ultimately putting it in stark relief.“I didn’t want to do the song at first because I didn’t think it was especially good for women,” Lauper says of “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” which was written as a lighthearted bop by Robert Hazard. “And then I saw my grandmother’s, my aunt’s, and my mother’s faces in my head,” she writes in her memoir. “And I thought that maybe I could do something and say something so loud that every girl would hear — every girl, every color.