That slowed-down cover of Jolene is going around DW, and it occured to me that if you could female-to-male genderswap a song by dropping pitch 25%, I could maybe male-to-female genderswap stuff by raising pitch 25%
…It doesn’t work consistently (you want a) someone who is singing all-out, not talk-singing, and b) either a male singing near the top of the male range or a female near the bottom of the female range,) and I have a tin ear so it’s possible these sound way worse that I think they do, but I have wasted way too much time on it because it’s fun.
So here, have a bootleg track from the late ’80s all-female production of Les Miserables, featuring Le Bien de l’ABC, the Saint-Simonian lesbian feminist commune, on the eve of revolution.
Le Bien are known casually as Les Biens, which makes it, if I’m reading my French right, a quadruple pun or something ridiculous like that - “Le Bien” means “the good”, so they are “The Goodness in the ABC/the Abased”, i.e. they stand for sublimity and learning as a virtue; but Les Biens means “the goods”, as in chattel which is a really, really bitter callout against the status of women in Restoration French society - even compared to the most abased of men, women are still treated like property; meanwhile it of course reads as “Lesbian”, and Greece at the time was undergoing a highly romanticized war of independence, so les ‘Lesbiennes’ are aligning themselves with that war as well as with classical learning and knowledge that women were often excluded from.
