“I need a change,” Aretha Franklin says at one point in “Respect,” the new film starring Jennifer Hudson as the Queen of Soul. “I want to sing what I want to sing.”
For all her talent, Franklin’s rise to superstardom wasn’t easy. When she left the world of gospel music to try to become a mainstream pop star, it meant a move into a segment of the industry that was dominated by men who had very specific assumptions about how a woman should sing – and what she should sing about.
