More than Fun

Comparing and contrasting two feminist icons

Labor Day weekend of 1983 was a fairly typical one on the Billboard pop chart. Regular denizens like the Police, Billy Joel, and Michael Jackson all had hits in the Top Ten. There were a couple women, too: Disco queen Donna Summer was making a comeback after a few lean years with “She Works Hard for the Money,” and Annie Lennox, one half of the Eurhythmics, was at the top of the charts with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” The record industry was shaking off its lethargy of the late 1970s, thanks to a growing economy, the new format of the compact disc, and building excitement surrounding Music Television (MTV), which was literally changing the face of popular music. A golden age was at hand.

The following week, two songs by novice performers were released by their record labels. On September 6, 1983, Portrait Records, a subsidiary of the Epic label, issued “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” by Cyndi Lauper, the leadoff single from her debut album She’s So Unusual. The following day, Sire Records, a Warner Brothers imprint, released “Holiday,” by Madonna Louise Ciccone—known simply by her first name of Madonna, which was also the name of her first album. By year’s end, both songs, and both albums, would be in heavy rotation on radio stations nationally, and both women were well on their way to becoming household names. They became signature figures of the era, and touchstones for generations of performers who followed.

To a perhaps surprising degree, the two women’s careers proceeded in largely parallel fashion. Unlike the friendly rivalry of, say, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, there is little record of contact between them. They were photographed together in their heyday, and Lauper has reported that Madonna jokingly refers to her as an “evil cousin.” Their relationship appears to be generally respectful, though Lauper did criticize Madonna’s remarks at the Women’s March of 2017, in which Madonna told President Donald Trump to “suck a dick” and referred to him in other profane language, which Lauper said “did not serve our purpose.” She is generally chary of such criticism however, which she has said stokes stereotypes. “They pit women against women, unfortunately,” she told disc jockey Shelli Sonstein in 2013.

 Certainly, Madonna and Lauper have often been compared, both in their heyday and ever since. In the early eighties, the smart money was on Lauper. She had a quirky genial personality and a sense of style rooted in her working-class background that was a breath of fresh air. Madonna, by contrast, seemed like a fairly slick latter-day disco artist who peddled trite tropes (“you must be my lucky star / because you shine on me wherever you are”). Madonna’s sex appeal was undeniable, but that alone would not be enough to last—pretty faces come and go in the entertainment business.

And yet by any measure it was Madonna who went on to have the higher-profile, and more durable, career. There are any number of reasons for this beyond her sex appeal, among them an entrepreneurial drive that made her an industry pioneer. Madonna turned provocation not simply into an art form, but also a marketable franchise that kept fans coming back for me. And even after her peak fame had passed, she remained an iconic figure on the music and fashion scene. Lauper has not exactly faded into obscurity—she won a Tony Award as composer for the 2012 musical Kinky Boots—but has not enjoyed anywhere near the notoriety.

But that’s not the point here. Instead, it’s to consider what we can learn—about these women, about their time, about the society in which we currently live—by looking closely at their work in their heyday. A comparison, both of similarities and differences, is quite revealing.

We can begin by saying that Madonna and Lauper have made a significant impact in popular music in terms of the typical industry by which such things have been measured. In the last forty years, Lauper has sold 50 million records, and continues to generate significant radio airplay. She’s So Unusual became the first debut album by a female artist to spawn four top-five singles on the Billboard chart, and she continued to generate hits for the remainder of the decade. Madonna, for her part, is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful female artist of all time with record sales of over 300 million. (According to Billboard, she’s the sixth most successful recording artist, behind the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Queen.) If we define the modern era of popular music as extending from Irving Berlin at the start of the 20^th century to Taylor Swift in the early 21^st, it’s clear that both Madonna and Lauper are figures of historical significance in terms of their commercial impact.

Yet the metrics by which we measure such things are fluid, and one has to place the two women’s achievements in context. These days, for example, it doesn’t really make sense to measure pop success in record sales, which is a relatively small part of the industry—streaming songs, not buying them, is key (and a yardstick by which Lauper and Madonna continue to do quite well in their demographic). Gauging the significance of pop artists in this sense is a little like ranking baseball players before and after the Dead-ball era. Is Madonna a more significant commercial—much less cultural—figure than Beyoncé, another figure known on the basis of her first name? Numbers alone won’t tell you.

Considering Lauper and Madonna in the context of their time also means recognizing that they arrived on a scene of considerable novelty and excitement. Perhaps the most important development was the explosion of music video—another medium whose impact is not measured directly in terms of sales. MTV reached the height of its cultural impact in the middle of the 1980s, which corresponds to both the height of Lauper’s and Madonna’s careers. Not coincidentally, both were savvy performers keenly attuned to the opportunities afforded by the form, which they exploited to great effect. Indeed, many of their videos have gone on to become classics of the genre, circulating on the Internet as quintessential documents of the decade long after MTV has waned as a force on the media landscape.

One also needs to see the two performers in the wider cultural and political context of their moment. Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and the entire decade (and even beyond) is known as the Reagan era. Reagan came to power as the leader of the ideological movement known as neoconservatism, whose hallmark involved actively questioning the social changes of the liberal 1960s. So-called family values, evangelical religion, and an affirmation of the free market were among the tenets of the period that enjoyed wide support—and generated widespread opposition.

Lauper and Madonna are important in this regard in that they both affirmed and challenged the conservative climate of the eighties. In the last two centuries, artists generally—and pop music performers in particular—have typically defined themselves in opposition to traditional bourgeois values, articulating alternatives often eagerly embraced by the young, who are at an impressionable stage of their lives and seeking forms of identity and expression that are alternatives to the status quo. This was something both Madonna and Lauper provided. Each, in their somewhat different ways, came out of New York avant-garde subcultures, both showing the clear influence of postmodernism, a movement which recognizes the plastic nature of personal experience, one Madonna would celebrate in her 1990 hit “Vogue” and Lauper in her elaborate hand-made costumes. Both also were willing to use outrage to thrill their constituency, whether in Madonna’s daring erotic imagery or Lauper’s brazenly ode to masturbation, “She-Bop.”

And yet for all their iconoclasm, one can see, especially in retrospect, that they were nevertheless influenced by the currents of their time. Among other things, the Madonna of “Material Girl” is a gleeful consumer capitalist who reflects the market values of the Reagan era. The unmarried, pregnant young woman she portrays in “Papa Don’t Preach” asserts her independence from an overbearing father, but the chorus of the song—“I’m keeping my baby”—embraces the pro-life message of evangelical Christianity. Lauper’s biggest hit was “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” not “Women Just Want Equal Pay for Equal Work.” A sexist could as easily be charmed as annoyed by the song (which may be why the burly macho wrestler Lou Albano played her father in the video).

Which brings us to the core of the matter for Madonna and Lauper as stars of the 1980s: they were women. Their gender identities were central to their sense of themselves, and how they were seen by others. Both considered themselves feminists at a time when the term had fallen into general disrepute (I’m not a feminist, but …” was a slogan of the time that reflected the movement’s retreat). Their norm-bashing assertiveness a big part of their appeal to their fans, and it’s what made them distinctive figures in a pop music scene that was still dominated by men, not only in terms of performance, but also production, publicity, and other aspects of the industry. Whatever the nuances of their politics (which many of their fans missed or ignored), they were each in their own way mavericks—which was, the appeal of any given song notwithstanding, the basis of their fame.

And this, in turn, brings us to one crucial difference between Madonna and Lauper, one that’s at least as significant as any one of their many similarities. Yes, they were both feminists, but they were feminists in sharply contrasting ways. Both asserted the necessity of female power in the public as well as the private sphere, but the basis of that power was significantly different.

Lauper was (to invoke the terminology of the famed feminist poet and theorist Katha Pollitt) an equality feminist. For her, womanhood, while an important source of identity, was not the essence of her essential human worth. “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” was experienced as such a manifesto of its time because it laid claim to prerogatives that had always been assumed by men: “I want to be the one to walk in the sun,” Lauper sang. The leadoff song from She’s So Unusual, “Money Changes Everything,” is shocking in the hard-headed—and hard-hearted—realism usually associated with men: “I found someone new / He’s waiting in the car outside.” Lauper had a zany persona and her visual iconography was unquestionably female. But her sex and her gender presentation were not finally central to who she was, what she wanted, and how she and her characters expected to be treated. Songs like “True Colors” or “Time After Time” could as easily have been performed by men as women, notwithstanding the distinctive contours of Lauper’s performance.

Madonna, by contrast, is a very different story. In the eighties she was, to use Pollitt’s terminology, a difference feminist: her power came from her sex. Difference feminism is not necessarily rooted in eroticism (though it largely was in her case); it can also take the form of moral power rooted in motherhood or presumably female traits like empathy and intuition. In this formulation, women are not essentially the same as men. Rather, they’re fundamentally different—and in crucial ways women are inherently stronger, if not better. “Like a Virgin” has an egalitarian thrust in that the song asserts that sexual pleasure is every bit as desirable and achievable for women as it is for men, but it’s framed in terms of the distinctively valued experience of virginity that is not a widely recognized, much less celebrated, for me. But whatever satisfactions it may afford on its own terms, sexual power is important in Madonna’s work because it’s convertible to other kinds. The narrator of “Material Girl” is forthright in leveraging her sex appeal for other kinds of currency. It’s not something to be ashamed of, but rather to be celebrated. In her life no less than her work, Madonna put her sex appeal at the heart of her persona and her ambition.

This fork in the feminist road was not created by Lauper and Madonna, and it persisted long after they passed the peak of their fame. Consider, for example, the difference between, say, Sheryl Crow, Alicia Keys, and Lorde on the one hand, and Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and Nikki Minaj on the other. Obviously, these categories are not hard and fast—equality feminists want and have sex appeal, while difference feminists are not solely about their sexuality. But the accents are clear, and brought into relative focus when looking at Lauper and Madonna’s careers. Their relationship with each other illuminates important aspects of American culture and history as a whole.