The 1980s File Feature
Why Should I Cry?
Nona Hendryx Why Should I Cry and the Summer of 1987 The summer of 1987 belonged to big production, programmed drums, and synthesizer textures that filled st…
01 The Story
Nona Hendryx Why Should I Cry and the Summer of 1987
The summer of 1987 belonged to big production, programmed drums, and synthesizer textures that filled stadium-sized spaces with a confidence that felt almost architectural. Into that landscape stepped Nona Hendryx, a veteran of two decades in the music industry who had first made her name as a member of Labelle, the trio that produced Lady Marmalade and pioneered a kind of theatrical Afrofuturist soul in the 1970s that was years ahead of the cultural conversation it would eventually join. By 1987, Hendryx was a decade into her solo career and producing music on her own terms, without the commercial pressures that had occasionally shaped Labelle’s recordings.
A Career Built on Refusal to Fit
Hendryx had always occupied a complicated commercial space that resisted easy categorization. Labelle’s work was too strange for easy radio formats in an era when radio formats were becoming increasingly rigid; her solo records were similarly resistant to the kind of demographic targeting that record labels used to organize their release schedules. She moved between funk, rock, new wave, and art pop without settling into any single lane or allowing any single label to fully define what she was. Why Should I Cry appeared on her 1987 album Female Trouble, a title that captured her artistic sensibility with characteristic precision. The record was produced with the polished sheen of mid-1980s R&B while maintaining Hendryx’s characteristic edge and willingness to ask uncomfortable questions in formats that preferred easy answers.
The Chart Performance
The single debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on May 23, 1987, at position 80. Over nine weeks it climbed through 70, 66, and reached its peak of number 58 during the week of June 13, 1987, before sliding back to 62 and then below the chart in subsequent weeks. Nine weeks of chart presence, peaking at 58, represented Hendryx’s most significant Hot 100 performance as a solo artist and confirmed that the record had genuine radio traction, not just a brief promotional moment.
The Competition in Summer 1987
June 1987 was a competitive moment on pop radio. Whitney Houston, Madonna, and Janet Jackson were each at peak commercial power, and the R&B and pop lanes were heavily trafficked by acts with major label promotional budgets and crossover campaigns built over multiple album cycles. Hendryx reaching number 58 without the machinery of a major crossover campaign behind her speaks to the quality of the recording and the loyalty of the audience she had spent years building through records and performances that rewarded attentive listeners.
What the Record Represents
For Hendryx, this single was evidence that an artist who had spent twenty years working at the intersection of commercial and experimental music could still generate genuine mainstream interest on her own terms. The nine weeks on the Hot 100 is the longest chart run of her solo career and a mark of an audience that stayed with the record rather than sampling it briefly and moving on to the next thing. Press play for one of 1987’s more interesting chart moments from an underappreciated corner of the decade’s R&B landscape.
The Album That Produced It
Female Trouble, the 1987 album that housed this single, was produced with a cleaner, more accessible sound than some of Hendryx’s earlier solo work had offered. The album represented a deliberate effort to engage the contemporary R&B market without abandoning the artistic personality that distinguished her from the mainstream. The production choices reflected the mid-1980s preference for digital clarity and programmed percussion, but the vocal approach and the lyrical sensibility remained distinctively Hendryx: direct, challenging, and uninterested in softening the edges of her emotional statements for the comfort of a mainstream audience that might not be accustomed to that kind of candor.
“Why Should I Cry?” — Nona Hendryx’s singular moment on the 1980s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Emotional Logic of Nona Hendryx Why Should I Cry
The title question is its own argument, compact and precise. It poses a challenge to the listener, asking them to consider whether grief over a lost or failed relationship is actually warranted by the circumstances or whether it is simply the default response, the thing you are expected to feel when a relationship ends regardless of whether the relationship deserved your commitment in the first place. The question does not have an obvious answer; it genuinely entertains the possibility that the expected emotional response, the mourning that social convention prescribes, might not be the correct one for this specific situation or this specific person.
Reclaiming Emotional Autonomy
Post-breakup songs have a long tradition in pop music of cataloging loss, pain, and longing with a thoroughness that can feel almost obligatory, as though grief is the only acceptable response to the end of romantic attachment. What Hendryx’s song offers instead is a different emotional posture: one that questions the premise that loss must produce suffering proportional to the investment made. The refusal to cry is not denial; it is a form of self-respect. The singer is asking whether the relationship that ended deserves her grief, whether the person who left merits tears, and entertaining the possibility that the answer might be no.
The Labelle Legacy and Female Resistance
Hendryx’s artistic biography gave her particular credibility in this kind of song. Labelle, especially in their later recordings, had been ahead of their time in presenting Black women as agents rather than objects of other people’s emotional narratives, as figures with their own desires, refusals, and capacities for self-determination. The solo work that Hendryx pursued after Labelle disbanded continued that project, writing and performing songs where the female narrator had clarity, desire, and the capacity for refusal, and where that refusal was presented as strength rather than coldness. This song belongs to that tradition and carries its full weight.
1987 and the Stakes of Self-Determination
The mid-1980s saw a flowering of explicitly self-determined female voices in R&B and pop that collectively shifted what the genre was allowed to be about. Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, and Anita Baker were each, in different ways, defining female emotional experience on their own terms rather than in response to male desire or expectation. Hendryx’s contribution to that conversation was characteristically less polished and more confrontational, asking harder questions than the mainstream usually permitted and refusing to soften the challenge embedded in the title. The song fits into the decade’s broader cultural negotiation about what women were allowed to feel and, perhaps more importantly, what they were allowed to refuse to feel regardless of social expectation or romantic convention.
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