“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Cyndi Lauper)

We’ll end our week of early MTV-era hits with today’s classic MTV song of the day, Cyndi Lauper’s anthemic “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” This smash hit was released as a single in June of 1983 and shot to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 and Billboard Dance Club Songs charts and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100. It topped the charts all around the world, including #1 placements in Australia, Canada, Chile, Ireland, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, and on the European charts.

“Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” more than any other song of the time, defined the MTV era. Some might argue that Madonna was the defining MTV artist, but I’d argue that she was just a little too self-consciously dramatic. Cyndi Lauper, on the other hand, was all about having fun. Yeah, she had her serious side (“True Colors,” “Time After Time”), but with this song and others (“She Bop,” “Money Changes Everything”) she represented all that was good and fun about the early ’80s. (Her junk store gypsy fashion sense was just as influential as Madonna’s, too.)

The song is nothing but pure pop confection. From the opening left-to-right swirling pan to the pulsating synths and electronic drums, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” is everything good about early ’80s pop music. Ms. Lauper’s unique vocal stylings (she is so unusual) were perfect for this track, emphasizing the “fun” part of the song’s title.

The video for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” helped establish that fun image. That crazily energetic clip got played about a gazillion times on MTV and everybody loved it. The video was done on the cheap (just $35,000) with an all-volunteer cast, including wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano and Lauper’s own mother, her attorney, her manager, fellow musician Steve Forbert, and a bunch of secretaries borrowed from the offices of her record label. The video continues strong today, with more than a billion (yes, a billion) views on YouTube alone.

Cyndi Lauper’s career continued long past the peak MTV era. Her debut album, She’s So Unusual (which peaked at #4 on the Billboard chart), was followed by another top ten album, True Colors. She had a total of ten top forty singles, including “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Time After Time,” “She Bop,” “All Through the Night,” “Money Changes Everything,” “The Goonies ‘R’ Good for You,” “True Colors,” “Change of Heart,” “What’s Going On,” and “I Drove All Night.”

Past her MTV peak, Ms. Lauper released a delicious album of cover songs (2003’s At Last), including songs like “Walk on By,” “Stay,” “La Vie En Rose,” “Unchained Melody,” “If You Go Away,” and other classics. (You should get this album; it’s terrific.) She also did a bit of acting, appearing on TV shows like Mad About You, Queer as Folk, and Bones, as well as the movies Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and The Opportunists. More famously, she composed the music for the hit Broadway musical Kinky Boots—and won a Tony for Best Original Score, the first solo woman to win in that category.

Bottom line, Cyndi Lauper not only personified the first MTV generation, she went on to have a long and successful career across multiple media. If you can sum up the early MTV years in a single video, it has to be “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” It is the music video that defined the fun that was MTV.