Girls Just Want to Have Fun

Robert Hazard wrote the song in 1979 and played it with bands around Philadelphia, from a male point of view. Rick Chertoff brought it to Lauper as a pop-electronic song. To her the lyrics sounded vapid and misogynistic, so she changed some of them, and Hazard's line "All my girls have got to walk in the sun" became "I want to be the one to walk in the sun". Ellie Greenwich sang backing vocals. Rob Hyman played keyboards, Eric Bazilian bass, Rick DiFonzo guitar and Anton Fig drums.

Released on 17 October 1983 as her first single, it reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in the issue dated 10 March 1984, behind Van Halen's Jump. It was number two in Britain and number one in ten countries. Edd Griles directed the video on the Lower East Side for under 35,000 dollars, with the wrestling manager Lou Albano as her father. It won Best Female Video at the first MTV Video Music Awards and passed a billion YouTube views in January 2022. The song was nominated for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. Lauper recorded a reggae-flavored version, Hey Now, in 1994, and since the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022 it has been a rallying cry in the United States.