Co-produced by La Générale de production, Foliascope with the support of Arte and Sony Music
TV series of 22 x 2’45” in co-production with La Générale de Production, with the support of Arte and Sony Music.
Through the great hits of popular music (from “It’s raining men” by The Weather Girls to “C’est la Ouate” by Caroline Loeb) Music Queens highlights how female writers, composers and performers have changed the way women are viewed and challenged the rules of an essentially male industry.
Each episode offers a musical analysis of a hit song, pointing out its findings and re-situating it in the history of world pop.
To support this decoding, Music Queens uses unpublished sound elements (a capella, multitracks, astonishing covers, song demos) which feed Rebecca Manzoni‘s Tubes And Co column, a regular feature of France Inter’s morning show for the past 7 years.
Rebecca Manzoni narrates the show with the help of Emilie Valentin, and the women in the various episodes are played by musicians and/or actors (Angèle, Jonis Joplin, The Ronettes, etc.).
The episodes conclude with a karaoke sequence, a popular narrative that is here hijacked, allowing the viewer to interact with the film. This is the power of a hit: to trivialise social progress against a backdrop of dancing ritornellos. In short, contraband propaganda.
Music Queens, because listening to a hit is also choosing heroines.
