In the spring of 1987, the unlikeliest singer in American pop took on the most sacred protest song in American soul. Cyndi Lauper, the neon-haired firecracker who had danced through “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” and “She Bop” into superstardom, released her version of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as a single. It was a daring choice, and not everyone thought it was a wise one. Gaye’s original was not just a hit; it was a monument, a song that had asked the hardest questions of its decade and been rewarded with immortality. To cover it was to invite comparison with a ghost. Lauper did it anyway, and in doing so she revealed something about herself that the cartoon image had hidden: underneath the thrift-store colours and the squeaky Queens accent, she had always been a serious artist with a conscience, and she had decided that the time had come to let the world see it.
To understand the size of the gamble, you have to remember where Lauper stood in 1986 and 1987. Her debut album, She’s So Unusual, released at the end of 1983, had been a phenomenon: the first debut album by a female artist to produce four top-five singles on the Billboard Hot 100, and the record that won her the Grammy for Best New Artist in 1985. She was, for a season, the most recognisable new voice in pop, a whirlwind of colour, humour and unmistakable vocal power. But that kind of success is also a trap. The industry, having sold millions of copies of a cartoon, wanted the cartoon again. Lauper wanted to grow. For her second album, True Colors, released on September 15, 1986, she took a producer’s credit alongside Lennie Petze, assembled a cast of famous collaborators, and made a record that was warmer, more mature and more ambitious than her debut. It worked, commercially at least: the album reached number four on the Billboard 200, was certified double platinum in the United States, and sold around seven million copies worldwide. Its title track, written by Tom Kelly and Billy Steinberg, gave her a second number one single, and “Change of Heart” reached number three. She had proved she was not a one-album wonder. The question was what she would do with the freedom that proof bought her.
Her answer was to get political, and her record company did not like it. Looking back on the album decades later, Lauper recalled that she had wanted to include a song called “A Part Hate” and her cover of “What’s Going On,” but that the label pushed back, arguing that it was too much of a change, that the girl who just wanted to have fun could not suddenly become political. Her reply was perfect, and it has become one of the great artist’s rebukes in pop history: “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” was political, she said, did they not get it? And she added the belief that had driven her from the start, that rock and roll could change the world. The label relented on the cover, if not on everything else, and “What’s Going On” made the album. It was, in its way, the most Lauper-like decision she could have made: stubborn, heartfelt, and completely uninterested in what was expected of her.
The song she chose carried sixteen years of history with it. “What’s Going On” had been written by Renaldo “Obie” Benson of the Four Tops, Al Cleveland and Marvin Gaye, after Benson witnessed police brutality at an anti-war protest in Berkeley, California, while on tour. Benson first wanted the Four Tops to record it, but his bandmates did not want a protest song, so the song found its way to Gaye, who reshaped its melody and lyrics and made it his own. Even then it nearly never came out: Berry Gordy, the head of Motown, resisted releasing it, doubting that such a song could sell. Gaye insisted, and the single, released in January 1971, proved him spectacularly right. It topped the R&B chart for five weeks, reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100, sold more than two million copies, and became the title track of an album that reached number one on the R&B chart and number six on the pop chart. It marked Gaye’s departure from the Motown hit factory towards music that was personal, spiritual and political all at once, and it has since been ranked among the greatest songs ever recorded, placing at number four on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time lists in 2004 and 2010. That was the mountain Lauper decided to climb.
The recording, made during the True Colors sessions that ran from late November 1985 to the end of May 1986, was produced by Lauper herself with Lennie Petze, and it rebuilt Gaye’s warm orchestral soul in the gleaming materials of mid-eighties pop. The personnel listed on the official Epic audio tells the story: Anton Fig on drums, Neil Jason on bass, Adrian Belew and Robert Holmes on guitars, Peter Wood on keyboards, with Lauper herself producing and singing lead and background vocals. Where Gaye’s original had floated on strings, voices and a jazz player’s sense of space, Lauper’s version moved on synthesizers and drum programming, its rhythm tighter and more insistent, its textures brighter and harder. It was not an attempt to imitate Motown. It was a translation, an effort to make a 1971 question sound urgent in 1987, in the language that radio in 1987 actually spoke.
The differences between the album version and the single version tell you how carefully Lauper and her team thought about that translation. On the album, the track opens with a series of gunshots, a stark reference to Vietnam that frames everything that follows, and at its end it segues into another cover, the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko,” as if the whole second side of the record were one long meditation on American music. For the single, released on March 2, 1987, the gunfire was removed and an alternate vocal was used in the intro, making the record less confrontational and more immediately inviting to radio. The single version is the one most often heard on compilations since. Around it, the remix culture of the decade did its work: club remixes by Shep Pettibone, one of the defining remixers of the era, carried the song to number seventeen on the American dance chart, and a long version running more than six minutes appeared on the twelve-inch single, with “One Track Mind” on the B-side. Lauper was not just covering a classic. She was putting it through every machine that eighties pop possessed, to see if it would survive them all.
The music video, directed by Andrew Morahan, gave the song its other public face. It showed Lauper in a tie-dyed shirt, singing and dancing on a darkened sound stage, accompanied by musicians filmed in black and white, and it used an extended mix of the track. The clip aired heavily on MTV, stayed in the channel’s top twenty video countdown for weeks, and earned a nomination at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. That mattered, because MTV was where Lauper’s audience lived, and the video made the case that a protest song could belong in the same rotation as the glossiest pop of the year. It did not preach. It danced, and it asked questions while it danced, which was exactly Lauper’s point.
On the charts, the single performed respectably without ever quite catching fire. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number sixty-three on the chart dated March 14, 1987, climbed to number thirty-five by the end of the month, broke into the top twenty at number nineteen on April 18, and peaked at number twelve on May 9, spending thirteen weeks on the chart in total, five of them inside the top twenty and ten inside the top forty. It also reached number twenty-nine on the Adult Contemporary chart. As one chart chronicler later put it, the single started well but lacked the momentum to crack the top ten, stalling just short of it. Coming after two top-five singles from the same album, that felt like a comedown, and it was followed by “Boy Blue,” which stalled at number seventy-one. True Colors, for all its quality, would sell far fewer copies than She’s So Unusual, and Lauper’s imperial phase as a singles artist was effectively over. But chart peaks are a poor measure of what this particular record was trying to do.
Critics, then and since, have been divided about it in instructive ways. The pan-European magazine Music & Media, reviewing the album, called the cover “striking,” praising its “good build up and atmosphere.” AllMusic’s retrospective review called it “ultimately endearing,” one of the ambitious stretches on the album that really pays off. Stereogum, in its long-running Number Ones column, was blunter, calling it a cover that “nobody really needed.” All three reactions are, in their way, correct, and together they describe the essential risk of the record. A cover of “What’s Going On” can never be necessary in the way a new song is necessary, because the original already exists and already says everything. Its justification has to be something else: the singer’s need to say it herself, in her own voice, to her own generation. Lauper’s version stands or falls on whether you believe she meant it, and almost nobody who listens to her vocal doubts that she did.
Hear the two versions side by side and the differences become the point. Gaye sings like a man watching his country from a troubled distance, his voice smooth and weary, carried along by an orchestra that seems to breathe with him. Lauper sings like someone standing in the middle of the crowd, her voice thinner, brighter and more jagged, pushing against the beat rather than floating on it. Where Gaye sounds like a prophet, Lauper sounds like a witness, a younger voice asking the same questions because nobody has answered them yet. That is the real reinterpretation here, and it is why the cover has aged better than its glossy production might suggest. The synths date it, inevitably, to 1986 and 1987. The questions do not date at all. Mother, mother, there is too much of you crying. Brother, brother, brother, there is far too many of you dying. Those lines were written about Vietnam and the streets of 1971. In 1987, in the middle of the Reagan years, with new wars and new worries filling the news, they still landed. They land now, too.
That staying power is the song’s legacy, and Lauper’s version has a particular place in it. Many artists had covered “What’s Going On” before her, but as one chart chronicler noted, few if any had dared to release it as a single, to bet commercial capital on a protest song in the middle of a pop career. Lauper did, and the bet cost her something: the single’s modest peak marked the moment when her run of top-ten hits ended, and her career moved into a different, less chart-driven phase. But it also bought her something more durable, which was credibility as an artist who would follow her conscience even when it was commercially inconvenient. The cover now reads as an early sign of the activist streak that would define the rest of her career, from her later work for LGBTQ rights to the farewell tour she announced decades later, still insisting that young women should hear what was really going on in the world. She sang a protest song when her label told her not to, and she never really stopped.
So the next time the opening notes play, and that bright, insistent voice starts asking its questions, remember what it took to get them onto a pop record in 1987. It took a singer who had already conquered the charts and decided that was not enough. It took a label that had to be argued into letting her try. It took a sixteen-year-old song that had already survived one record company’s doubts and was ready to survive another’s. And it took an audience willing to hear, underneath the synthesizers and the dance remixes, the same plea Marvin Gaye had made in 1971, now carried by a woman in a tie-dyed shirt dancing on a darkened stage. The world had not answered the question in sixteen years. Lauper, characteristically, asked it again anyway, louder, and in full colour.
Watch the video below and hear a pop star risk her hit streak on a question that still has no easy answer.
Sources:
Wikipedia — “True Colors (Cyndi Lauper album)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Colors_(Cyndi_Lauper_album))
PopRedux80 — “‘What’s Going On’ by Cyndi Lauper” (http://www.popredux80.com/2020/02/whats-going-on-by-cyndi-lauper.html)
Parade — “’80s Pop Legend Marks 39 Years of Her Iconic Album” (https://parade.com/news/80s-pop-legend-marks-39-years-of-her-iconic-album)
Stereogum — “The Number Ones: Cyndi Lauper’s ‘True Colors'” (https://stereogum.com/2112347/the-number-ones-cyndi-laupers-true-colors/columns/the-number-ones)
AllMusic — “True Colors” review (https://www.allmusic.com/album/r11420)
MUBI — “Cyndi Lauper: What’s Going on [MV] (1987)” (https://mubi.com/en/us/films/cyndi-lauper-what-s-going-on-mv)
The Second Disc — “Reissue Theory: Cyndi Lauper’s Odds and Ends” (https://theseconddisc.com/2010/08/12/reissue-theory-cyndi-laupers-odds-and-ends/)
YouTube — “What’s Going On · Cyndi Lauper” (Epic-provided audio) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBtTr2i8JXs)