Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, “Version Cuisine”, Causing A Buzz In France

“It came very quickly and very ridiculously,” say comedy duo and musicians, Charlie & Styl’O, about their latest skit causing a buzz in France on social media.

They were in the kitchen and started singing the beat of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean replacing English words for French ones, starting with the French word for apple, pomme, pomme, as a beatbox base. From there, the word play unravelled–the woo woos were replaces by hou-mous–and before long, “and she was more like a beauty queen” became “Hachis Limonade Des Linguines.”

It’s been trending on social media in France with lots of people commenting that, thanks to the duo, they finally know the words to the song.

It’s part of a programme of work called Parodisque, where the pair called Charlie & Styl’O try to parody four songs (disques) per week (sometimes in French, sometimes in English) as part of an early morning skit for radio France Bleu at 6.55am. A lot of the radio shows in France have a humorous skit before the 7am news–France Inter, has Daniel Morin at 6.57 each weekday morning–and the pair cover topics that range from Black Friday to shaving.

They began in 2016 with Disney’s Let It Go, when Frozen was being sung by everyone around the world. La Reine des Neiges (Queen of the Snow, as Frozen is called in France) became La Reine des Mères, a parody on the banality of life as a mother–”we are very used to creating something crazy out of nothing”, says Charlie. The video went viral on YouTube, and was watched by over a million people.

It’s not the only Billie Jean parody to come out of lockdown–Quarantine (is Not Quite Over) has nearly 2 million views on YouTube.