8 Songs Millennials Don’t Know Are Remakes
4. Girls Just Want To Have Fun - Cyndi Lauper
When Millennials belt out this tune at Karaoke night, they assume they are singing an 80’s pop anthem by one of MTV’s first video stars, Cyndi Lauper. This girl power single launched Lauper into stardom and helped sell more than 5 million copies of her She’s So Unusual album. But this song about girls, was actually written by a - gasp – boy.
Robert Hazard, a Philadelphia-based singer/songwriter wrote and recorded his demo of the song in in 1979 for his band Robert Hazard and The Heroes. Hazard was describing how lucky he was to be around all these girls who were so willing to have se—er, fun with him. Thanks to Lauper’s re-make, it has instead become what the New York Times called a "pogo-punk unisex spirit of the irreverent and permissive early 1980's.“
It has been used in a range of movies and TV shows like Clueless and Gilmore Girls and even became its own movie starring a pre-SATC Sarah Jessica Parker, and a pre-90210 Shannen Doherty in 1985. Any song that gets the Weird Al treatment – Yankovic parodied this for his 1985 Dare To Be Stupid album called Girls Just Want To Have Lunch – deserves to have its true history known.