This year Seeyousound blows out 10 candles and has chosen to celebrate this first decade at the opening in flamboyant style with a one-of-a-kind pop icon, Cyndi Lauper. And it does so with the long-awaited Italian premiere of Let The Canary Sing by Alison Ellwood, a documentary that traces a sincere artistic and human trajectory of the New York artist. And for Lauper too it is an important birthday: the 40th anniversary of She’s So Unusual (1983), the debut album that brought her success and that marked the history of pop music and the culture of an era, leaving an important legacy, through the themes it addressed, to later generations as well.
From a scrappy childhood in Queens to the long apprenticeship in a cover band, from her climb up the charts to her experiences in cinema and her battles in defence of human rights. It’s all in this film, where Lauper herself leads us by the hand through her life by way of testimonies from famous figures and period footage. The title refers to the phrase the judge exclaimed at the end of a thorny legal dispute involving the artist and her band, Blue Angel, sued by their former manager over a debt. Literally: let the canary sing. It is 1980 and the road that leads her to success from here on is very short.
The film is not short of unseen behind-the-scenes stories, curiosities about the genesis of her biggest hits, Time After Time, True Colors, She Bop and, above all, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, the song that, more than any other from the ’80s to today, has become a feminist manifesto. It is no surprise that the colourful and eccentric video has passed a billion views. In a period when idol artists of the calibre of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince were rampant, Cyndi Lauper managed to emerge and stand out with her atypicality, her fluorescent mane and her bizarre look, a mix of retro and punk style that she carried over into her way of expressing herself too, ranging from new wave to rock by way of reggae in constant experimentation, to get closer to the best version of herself even when things seemed to go wrong. Because it wasn’t all roses, and the fact that she became a star and not a mere flash in the pan owes much to her tenacity and determination
. It’s all there in that Girls Just Want to Have Fun, which is much more than an invitation to have fun; it is a proclamation that goes well beyond the feminist manifesto. Having fun understood as making a nuisance of yourself, revolutionising, questioning canons and stereotypes when the occasion calls for it. Originally that song had been conceived by a man, Robert Hazard, in 1979, and it put a man’s fun at the centre. She decided to overturn its meaning. And voilà, the song enters history with a subversive power that anticipates the times. It smacks of feminism but also of inclusion tout court. With her, we moved from the “You can sit with us” of the elitist, exclusive world of parties, excess, champagne and haute couture at Studio 54, exalted only a few years earlier by Amanda Lear in the song Fashion Pack (1979), to the “Everyone is welcome”, colourful and flamboyant too, but in which the obsession with image and feeling “in” at all costs seems to have vanished.
We can all feel beautiful, at the centre of attention, and even the countercultures and ethnic minorities (who appear in various capacities as extras in Girls Just Want to Have Fun) are not included as shock factor a token or exotic element, but as part of a whole. (Let us remember that 1983 was also the year Trading Places (Una poltrona per due in Italy) was released, in which it was not yet politically incorrect to say “negro”). What comes across is the ability to communicate, the desire to represent any woman: thin, fat, white, Black, beautiful or ugly. The creativity of Cyndi Lauper, a prismatic artist of a thousand souls, was never self-referential; every one of her stylistic choices, every one of her lines held a generous message. And this is borne out by her tireless and constant commitment over the years as an activist engaged in feminist battles and in defence of the causes of LGBTQIA+ people.
“I want to be the one to walk in the sun”. We can all be that girl walking in the sun, as the most beautiful line in “Girls Just Want to Have Fun“.
