Cyndi Lauper Is Too Old to Prove Anything, at 70

Cyndi Lauper left her Upper West Side apartment block one Friday afternoon in May and ventured out into the streets of New York City. She had a stack of beaded bangles on each arm, rainbow-soled trainers and spectacles covered in glitter. In her palm floated a parasol made of rice paper. She studied the people as she went, making comments whenever she saw anything that piqued her attention.
She said, speaking of her upscale neighbourhood, “Of course, up here it’s fashion hell.” Nevertheless, she would turn to gawk at another lady every few blocks, her well-known New York accent rising and falling with delight at what she saw:

“How adorable are these ladies? Look at them!”
Did you adore those trousers? I had a soft spot for those trousers.
She exclaimed, “Look at this lady,” as she stepped off the curb and saw a bystander. The lady moved with dexterity, her body covered in fuchsia and cherry tones, and a tomato-red stripe running through her silver hair as she propelled a walker with a shiny metal frame. “Excellent,” Lauper said. “Go on!”
The pop star and social justice advocate isn’t simply taking to the streets at the age of 70. The Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Farewell Tour, Lauper’s farewell tour, was revealed on Monday. The tour will see her headline venues throughout North America from late October to early December. Additionally, the documentary “Let the Canary Sing,” which debuted at the Tribeca Festival the previous year and is about her life and work, is available to watch onParamount+.
For more than ten years, Lauper has not put on a significant tour—“a true tour, that’s mine.” She’s jumping through her window of chance, however, since it’s closing. In a few years, “I don’t think I can perform the way I want to,” she said. “I wish to have strength.”
She also had no idea that she would be filming her life narrative until she eventually consented to sit for filmmaker Alison Ellwood. “Since I’m still alive, I wasn’t planning to do a documentary,” she said. More importantly, she didn’t think she was being misinterpreted. She believed she had spoken exactly what she intended to convey as she danced around the city in the 1983 music video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
Regarding her admirers, she said, “Everything I wanted them to understand was in that video.” Many individuals may relate to her: Over a billion people have seen the video on YouTube. She presents it as her thesis forty years later, arguing that it contains the key to unlocking her creative vision and comprehending everything that came after. Ultimately, as she put it, “You never have to wonder where a New Yorker stands.” “They’ll tell you up front.”
CYNDI LAUPER, who was reared in Queens and was born in Brooklyn, used to dance about the house to the Beatles’ music, with her elder sister Elen covering McCartney’s vocals and Lauper taking on John Lennon’s. It was her first instruction in song structure and harmony. However, she carried a copy of Yoko Ono’s feminist conceptual art book “Grapefruit” with her when she left home at the age of 17.
Lauper told me that Ono had taught her that “you can create art in your head, and then you can view things differently.” This mindset came in handy as she attempted—and often failed—to make a living as a painter, shoe salesperson, racecourse hot walker, IHOP waiter, gal Friday at Simon & Schuster and vocalist in a cover band.
Lauper was a troubled woman who sang other people’s songs at dive bars and clubs on Long Island. She said that while she attempted to channel Janis Joplin, “I was stuck inside her body, and she didn’t like it, and I didn’t like it.” It “came out sounding like Ethel Merman” when she attempted to sound like Gene Pitney. “You start to feel that you’re just not good enough” after a time.
In all honesty, however, she was simply not very adept at being anyone else than Cyndi Lauper. “I told the stories that I knew about the women that I knew,” the singer-songwriter said, when she first began composing and arranging music for herself. “About my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother.” Even if at first few others were interested in listening, they helped her find her way back to the rhythms of her own life. “I performed the encore at my first concert for 14 people, did you understand?” she said.
The title of the documentary is a quote taken from a real-life court case: The early goals of Lauper’s career were entwined with those of her former manager, who sued her to retain creative control over her songs. While attempting to get away from him, she became bankrupt. “Let the canary sing,” said the judge, who had taken Lauper’s side.
After being set free, Lauper made contact with Robert Hazard, the composer of the song “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” Lauper made some adjustments, and he had structured it as a rock song from a man’s point of view, with the females representing the women he saw having sex. Recasting it as a joyful declaration in public, she claimed emancipation from the job, the family, and patriarchy while denouncing a sexist double standard (“Oh mama dear, we’re not the fortunate ones”). She also adjusted the tones, raising her voice to a level that was unmissable. She said, “I was trumpeting an idea, which is why I sang that high.”
And there came the video after that. The most significant aspect of the video, according to Lauper, was that it was what is today referred to as “inclusive.” Lauper included her mother, her lawyer, her manager, a slew of record-company clerks, and a mixed-race ensemble of singers and dancers in addition to the Italian American professional wrestler Lou Albano. She said, “I was tired of the music industry’s segregation.” “People come together to form a style.”
In 1983, MTV was still in its early stages, so it was fortunate that Lauper’s first album, “She’s So Unusual,” was released at the same time the network was growing. She considered her public persona to be a kind of visual art. Her stylist was a vintage buyer, and her makeup artist was a painter.
Regarding the singer’s style, Laura Wills, the creator of the vintage store Screaming Mimi’s, commented that “people sometimes get the wrong idea that it was very thrown together.” “That’s just not how people looked.” Lauper worked at Wills in the early 1980s, often exchanging her labour for clothing. Wills began styling Lauper after her career took off, and the two would frequently put together Lauper’s looks like they were swiping chips across a poker table; for example, Wills would say, ‘I’ll see your polka-dot socks and striped capris, and I’ll raise you a plaid shirt’. “I’ll raise you a paisley hat and see your plaid top, striped capris and polka-dot socks.”
Lauper seemed to become well-established as a feminist icon overnight. She demanded that the reporters understand the politics behind her artistic decisions and refused to reveal her age, stating, “I’m not a car.” She told the media, “I wore the corset to undo the power of the binding of women.” After a friend passed away from AIDS, she recorded the song “True Colours” in 1986 and appeared on the cover of Ms. Magazine.
She acknowledged that her frequent discussions about AIDS had likely cost her company, but she felt that as a decent Italian, she should defend her family. She established True Colours United in 2008 with the goal of assisting LGBT adolescents who are homeless. Additionally, she established the Girls Just Want to Have Fundamental Rights fund in 2022 to promote the right to an abortion as well as other reproductive justice initiatives.
Following the release of “She’s So Unusual,” Lauper was awarded the Grammy for best new artist in 1985. Records were broken by the album and its hits, including “Time After Time” and “All Through the Night.” However, something strange was taking place. She glanced around, seeing many reflections of herself. Lauper snorted sharply as she said, “When I first became famous, I felt like the whole world just kind of went and sucked everything up.” The external corsets, the colour, the jewelry—everything about it. then put it to use after that. Throw it away. Next up!
Lauper was said to be a packaged product. No, I did it. That’s what I wore. That was my appearance. It was my neighbourhood, she said. “My brain works.”
Lauper objected to the lighthearted idea of the film when she received word that a studio was turning her great single into a film. She said, “I guess it was about a couple of girls… trying to have fun.” (Henry Hunt and Sarah Jessica Parker starred.) Hazard’s version with additional singers was included instead of Lauper’s song, which Lauper had denied permission to use. It sucked, in her opinion. “You appropriated my fashion sense. And I was completely unrelated to it.
Lauper was compared to other female artists in the 1980s in such a way that it was inferred there wasn’t room for them all. She was compared to other female artists, including Madonna, who also released her first album in the same year. Stars and fans were urged to choose one on talk programmes, in schoolyards, and even on the charity hit “We Are the World.” Lauper said to me, “It was like apples and oranges.” Or, in Newsweek in 1985, as she said it: “She’s just doing her thing.” My speciality is a little different. Lauper expressed regret, saying, “I would have liked to have a friend.”
Despite fighting most of her fights by alone, Lauper has inspired countless numbers of women. Among her admirers is Nicki Minaj, who took her onstage in Brooklyn in April for a duet on the song “Pink Friday Girls,” which features a sample of her. The 26-year-old singer-songwriter Chappell Roan said, “I think Cyndi Lauper is the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper,” in response to an interviewer’s question on how it feels to be named the Gen-Z Cyndi Lauper.
Following her debut, Lauper released eleven additional albums, including dance, country, and blues records. She moved to Broadway in the early 2000s, where she penned the music and lyrics for the musical “Kinky Boots” and starred in “The Threepenny Opera” after Harvey Fierstein, the book’s author, selected her for the role. The 72-year-old actor and playwright said, “There’s a small group of people I consider my children; she’s one of my daughters.” Fierstein told me that he thought Lauper’s abilities were underutilised in rock and that he wanted to experience the writing process of a song that Lauper would never perform.
“Her phone recording in the beauty salon, with her head in the dryer, was my favourite,” he said. (Lauper used to multitask a much.) The noise from the salon competed with her autoharp. “A $10 million production on an autoharp song with a dryer background is really difficult to sell,” he said. “But we actually did that.” Lauper became the first woman to win the Tony for best score on her own.
Lauper was never one to give up on herself in a field that demands the ravenous search of the novel and the cynical extraction of identity. She had sung the totemic song and established the revolutionary style. Millions and billions of her admirers were motivated to be authentic by her. Why should she be forced to adopt a new identity?
Walking around the Upper West Side with Lauper, we stopped by an exhibition on the abstract artist Sonia Delaunay, went by the original Screaming Mimi’s site (which is now a dry cleaners), and made our way back to her apartment, where she kindly allowed me to come up.
Two little pugs, called Lulu and Ping, were outside the doorway, beyond the doorman, and beyond a curtain and matting with cheetah prints, waiting for Lauper to come back. Her husband, actor David Thornton, told me about their meet-cute on the set of the 1991 film “Off and Running,” but she vanished to arrange a plate of ginger cookies, the same sort Jackson Browne usually brought her on Christmas. He played a killer, she played a phoney mermaid. He was immediately taken in by her endearing sense of humour right off the set.
He quipped, “She’s the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Rodney Dangerfield.” That is to say, she is so hilarious that she doesn’t always get the credit she deserves. He said, “I don’t think anybody realises how hard she works.”
She cranks up the radio in her apartment to get ready for the trip, which irritates the pugs as she dances and sings. Four days a week, she works with a voice coach. She trains as if it were a sport. Physical therapy, weights, stretching, yoga, more weights, aerobics, physical therapy, and weights are all part of her weekly workout regimen. She feels like a horse because of how much salad she’s been eating.
“But you have to be an athlete to be a singer,” she said. “You are not allowed to [expletive]. Yes, when you’re twenty. But as you age? No.
She’s been thinking about “all the crazy stuff I tried that didn’t work” throughout the course of her lengthy career as the tour draws near. The black outfit with butterfly wings that she was supposed to unveil when she emerged from a cocoon. the part when she was meant to transform into an old-fashioned cartoon figure behind a backlit screen. As she sang, a mechanical skirt that resembled a globe gently rotated around her.
She’s not quite sure what she’s going to accomplish this time. “Who the hell I am is who the hell I am” will never change, no matter what.

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