‘Good Vibrations’: The song that made Cyndi Lauper want to be a musician: “So ahead of the curve”
For most people, the seminal memories of adolescence involve finding style, first kisses, and new horizons. For Cyndi Lauper, it was the sound of a whole new vibration.
That might sound like a contrived thing to say under normal circumstances, but in the singer’s case, it was quite literal in the respect of the music she heard in her youngest years, which not only soundtracked those earliest important moments in her life but also steered her towards the path of being an artist herself.
There’s no understating the enormous impact this can have on anyone’s life, but particularly someone like Lauper, who went on to change the sonic world and challenge the status quo in her own right. In order for that bolt of inspiration to have struck her so fiercely as it did, she would have had to have heard something truly electric, mind-boggling, and way beyond its time.
Luckily for her, Brian Wilson had just the right act of musical sorcery stored up his sleeve. When he and the rest of The Beach Boys released their iconic hit ‘Good Vibrations’ in 1966, the meaning behind the title was representative of something far more than just something pleasing floating through the speaker.
It was designed to be truly effervescent, and Lauper caught on to that bug straight away. “At a young age, I heard the theremin on ‘Good Vibrations’, and I just flipped over it,” she once explained. “Brian Wilson was so ahead of the curve.” We can all be in agreement with her on that one, but it also takes a musician’s intuition to look beyond the guise of sonic genius.
“Although he suffered for so long,” Lauper reasoned, “What he translated and transcended from that was an amazing gift to the world. He was truly one of the greats.” With Wilson’s senses tingling and those vibrations emanating from every fibre of him, the singer was right in asserting that his true gift was in being able to serve that up to the masses.
It was fair to say that Wilson had the world eating out of the palm of his hand when it came to that aspect of his career. That sheer innovation of musicality, the creativity, and the ability to find some sort of sense through a kaleidoscopic lens was always going to set the frontman’s legacy apart from the rest.
In Lauper’s case, his energy was also so invigorating upon its introduction into her life that she could never just put it to one side and forget about it. From the first second that ‘Good Vibrations’ started shaking through the air into her orbit, she saw the chance of a life-changing elixir right in front of her very eyes. Her only choice was to follow it.
If that was the one song that transformed Lauper into an artistic superstar, then it’s just another addition to the list in Wilson’s never-ending scroll of accolades, among which he has so many. She joins a club of thousands who have walked the musicians’ path due to the Beach Boys, and all because of a single track and its chalice of permanent positive vibes.
