Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “My God, she was the light of his life,” exclaimed Alex Wright. “He couldn’t sing her praises enough. But when I would ask him, ‘Does she know how you feel?’ he would just shrug.”

  Alex says she felt that by 2007 the Knowleses were still a family that, maybe more than ever, held their feelings protectively close, unwilling—or maybe unable—to express to one another how they really felt for fear of what might happen, of what closely guarded truth might be revealed in the process.

  “I came to believe it was a pathology that had been passed down through the years,” Alex concluded, “and that there really wasn’t anything any of them could do about it. I thought, ‘My God, this has to be so painful for them.’ I felt that the pressure had to be too much, that eventually something would have to give . . . that the whole thing was about to blow at any moment.”

  The Beyoncé Experience

  How y’all doin’,” Beyoncé shouted out to more than fifty thousand people at the Tokyo Dome on April 10, 2007, as she began her trademark strut down a massive stage to the exciting intro of “Crazy in Love.” Accompanied by several female dancers, for the next two hours she would work nonstop, singing and dancing. By the time she’d finished her rip-roaring twenty-two-song set, which included a lengthy medley of her Destiny’s Child hits as well as a healthy selection of her most recent songs, she’d once again proved herself as one of contemporary pop music’s greatest live performers. Longtime music journalist Steven Ivory put it this way: “If Tina Turner and Michael Jackson had a baby, that child would be Beyoncé.” It’s certainly true that her showmanship—her charisma, her vocal prowess and intuition; her sheer athleticism—recall the skills of both those great performers.”

  Like the great Tina Turner before her, with her troupe of dancers, the Ikettes, Beyoncé uses her own dancers to generate excitement and unified spectacle. However, the dancers bring attention to Beyoncé, who, while executing the same steps as her troupe, instinctively adds a subtle authority missing from the moves of the rest of the ensemble. Whereas back in the day Ike Turner had the last word on how his wife, Tina, and the Ikettes appeared and moved, no man is in control of what happens on Beyoncé’s stage. Of course, for The Beyoncé Experience, as for all of her tours, she hires choreographers—but she runs her dance presentation from top to bottom herself.

  For all her hip-hop swagger and preoccupation with producing videos and short films that are often modernist and surreal, Beyoncé’s onstage sensibilities harken back to 1960s soul. When she paid tribute to Tina Turner in 2005 on the Kennedy Center Honors, with stunning rendering of Turner’s “Proud Mary” (complete with three of Beyoncé’s backup girls restyled to look exactly like the Ikettes), it was more clear than ever that Beyoncé is a performer in the oldest and most traditional style of R&B. Her outfits—sequin, leather, and lace creations—are sexy, but often in a conventional Vegasy style. Then again, it’s her traditional approach to performing—the notion that the true entertainer is one who does onstage what few in the audience can do—that separates her from most of the stars of her generation. She understands that an audience wants to see a performer work hard.

  The show in Tokyo was just the first of almost a hundred in Asia, Australia, North America, Europe, and Africa. Every night, Beyoncé gave the same level of exhausting energy.

  Part of Beyoncé’s process regarding total focus and concentration during tour dates has to do with picking and choosing with whom she socializes on the road. For instance, if a dancer who has been hired to perform on tour with her thinks that she is going to end up becoming close friends with the lady herself, she can forget it. It’s not going to happen.

  “Everybody thinks because we dance with her and are around her more than a lot of people, that we actually know everything that is happening, but we don’t,” said Tanesha Ksyn Cason, who under the stage name Miss Ksyn has danced with Beyoncé for many years. “Sometimes we don’t even know for sure what the next leg of a tour will be. We usually find out through the fans. Like a fan will send us a flyer, ‘Hey, you guys, we can’t wait to see you here.’ Then we go, ‘Okay, cool, so I guess that’s the next leg.’ Later we might get an e-mail from our agents saying, ‘I’m just letting you know, these are the next dates.’ ”

  The dancers and musicians usually travel together and stay in one hotel, while the crew and other technical people travel separately and stay in another location, and Beyoncé and her personal staff in a third. Though she obviously knows where everyone else is staying, they don’t know her exact whereabouts. The reasons are twofold. First, she wants her privacy. Second, she doesn’t want to have to wonder if any of her touring personnel spilled the beans should the location of her hotel be leaked to the press. If no one knows where she’s staying, they are all in the clear. “Truly, we’d just as soon not know where she is than have to worry about being under suspicion,” said Miss Ksyn. “She’s generous to us during rehearsals and performances, and then she likes her private time when we aren’t working. No one has ever had a problem with that. You want to give it to her. You want her to have it. You feel she deserves it.”

  As much as she loved performing, by the time the tour ended in Taipei on November 12, Beyoncé was both emotionally and physically drained—a usual state of being for her in recent years. Still, there was work to do; another album was right around the corner.

  I Am . . . Sasha Fierce

  In December 2007, as Beyoncé began work on her third solo album, it was as if she’d paid heed to the criticisms of her previous album, B’Day. Though B’Day had been a worldwide multiplatinum success, some commentators felt that it lacked focus and substance. Of course, in today’s world of musical mediocrity, Beyoncé’s tremendous talent, ambition, and relentless drive elevates whatever she records head and shoulders above her contemporaries, even if sometimes the tunes themselves are lacking, which many felt was the case with B’Day. “The songs are just not on B’Day,” is how one critic succinctly put it. “In fact, I can’t remember a single one of ’em.” If there was an upside to such criticism, it was that it encouraged Beyoncé to ponder the notion of creating a record that would allow her to explore the memorable best of two musical genres—rhythmic songs people could remember, and ballads they would never forget.

  Most observers agreed that the real problem with B’Day had been that Mathew hadn’t been allowed to put his full imprint on it. In the process of settling that score, then, Beyoncé would give him much more latitude in the production of the next album. Apparently, whatever was going on in his personal life at this time had no bearing on his participation in her record, at least in Beyoncé’s view—and she was the boss. Though grappling with conflicting emotions where Mathew was concerned, she was also adept, as we have seen, at finding ways to work around personal chaos when necessary. She knew she needed Mathew on this project. It was a wise move on her part. Mathew’s influence as co–executive producer (with Beyoncé) would be to the great advantage on this album, which would be called I Am . . . Sasha Fierce. In fact, this set would be the near-perfect amalgamation of father’s and daughter’s musical tastes and, as such, stand as a glorious testament to their many years of stellar work together.

  Beyoncé’s concept for I Am . . . Sasha Fierce would take the form of a two-disc package: Disc One would be called I Am . . . and would highlight the best of the midtempo songs at her disposal. Ultimately, she would decide on airy, introspective decidedly “pop” odes to love and relationships. These selections would call to mind the 1970s music business term “crossover,” used back in the day when acts like Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston crafted mainstream pop designed to reach audiences beyond their black fan base.

  Disc Two would be called Sasha Fierce. It would feature the kind of dance- and rap-influenced urban tracks with which Beyoncé had become synonymous, all under the auspices of the moniker she’d come up with for her aggressively sexy and angry alter ego.

  To forge new ground for two discs worth of new music, B
eyoncé would need new collaborators. Therefore, on board for this album would be some familiar names she’d worked with in the past—Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins and Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, among others. However, there would also be new blood, most notably Ryan Tedder, a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, producer, and leader of the pop/rock band OneRepublic. Other names new to the Beyoncé camp would include songwriters Toby Gad and BC Jean, who contributed the I Am album opener, “If I Were a Boy,” a poignant, introspective pop ballad about society’s gender double standards (the only song on this collection that Beyoncé didn’t write or cowrite).

  “Beyoncé’s whole trip is simple,” said a close friend of hers. “She wants to inspire. That has always been her intention. If a song like ‘Halo’ comes along that she feels will do the job, she latches on for dear life and does what she can to make it the performance of a lifetime, a performance that would be considered inspirational. After she finished ‘Halo,’ she was very satisfied with it. ‘It takes you to another place,’ she told me. That’s always her intention . . . to go to that other place and take her fans with her.”

  On Disc Two, Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé adeptly explored electronic pop with “Radio” and “Sweet Dreams.” There was also the beat-laden “Video Phone” and “Diva,” both personifying what Beyoncé viewed as the Sasha Fierce ethos. However, some fans questioned whether these songs were completely emblematic of the alter ego. After all, that dual identity wasn’t put forth to exemplify a certain type of music as much as it was intended as a kind of performance art. Sasha was the angry Beyoncé, the iteration of Beyoncé who was fully able to access her true feelings—sexual or hostile—in dance and in attitude. Maybe this confusion was for the best, though. Maybe as the character aged in her life and Beyoncé began to lose her grip on what she really represented, such confusion might see Sasha Fierce finally slip away, or at the very least merge into the real Beyoncé. Maybe Sasha was actually becoming unnecessary?

  While I Am . . . Sasha Fierce would produce a number of unforgettable songs, it was “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” that would take Beyoncé’s career to new heights. Producers/songwriters Christopher “Tricky” Stewart and Terius “The-Dream” Nash, along with Thaddis “Kuk” Harrell, are responsible for this spacey, ethereal, and ultimately exciting musical track. Nash’s subject matter when he began the lyrics fit well with Beyoncé’s ongoing musical narrative about women and empowerment. By the time she took it upon herself to finish it, the lyrics perfectly represented her outspoken, aggressively feminist image, making it the obvious choice for the first single from I Am . . . Sasha Fierce (released concurrently with “If I Were a Boy”).

  “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” went beyond hit status to become nothing short of a cultural phenomenon, the Bob Fosse–inspired choreography of the video inspiring nothing short of a viral dance craze. “It’s the cheapest video I’ve ever done,” she told Australian interviewer Steve Jones, “and it became the most iconic. I never thought I would have a body of work that would be such a huge part of pop culture.” (Who could ever forget the Justin Timberlake takeoff of the video, performed with Beyoncé and Adam Samberg on Saturday Night Live?) Today, the song remains a theme and catchphrase (replete with the hand gesture featured in its stylized black-and-white music video) for the empowered woman. Beyoncé not only took the shame out of ditching a dead-end relationship, she actually made it cool and hip.

  Not only would “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” become one of Beyoncé’s biggest songs—hitting number one on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 13, 2008, her fifth chart-topper—but it would push I Am . . . Sasha Fierce to the top of the charts as well. Eventually the album would sell more than eight million copies. Nominated eight times at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, Beyoncé would enjoy a record-setting six wins—at that time the most awards won by a female artist in one night.

  Cadillac Records and Obsessed

  She wanted to act. One couldn’t blame her. Given the right role, she was very good at it. She also took it very seriously. However, because roles for African-American actresses have historically not been plentiful in Hollywood, Beyoncé didn’t have a wide variety from which to choose. At the end of 2008, she starred in Sony Pictures’ Cadillac Records, not at all a bad choice in terms of film opportunities.

  When it was announced that Beyoncé would be playing R&B and blues singer Etta James in Cadillac Records, there was understandable skepticism in the media. Beyoncé had little in common with the ribald Etta, an abandoned child who battled racism and heroin addiction and whose performances of songs (such as her classic “I’d Rather Go Blind”) spoke to a life of heartbreak and despair. In her obituary (January 20, 2012), Time noted that she’d “endured a life more wrenching than any of her songs.” Beyoncé had certainly worked hard throughout her life, but, by her own admission, she hadn’t really struggled, at least not the way Etta James had. Likely, if this film had been a biopic of James, the casting would have been met with much more derision. However, Cadillac Records purported to tell the story of the influence Chess Records of Chicago had on the birth of rock and roll in the 1950s with artists such as Chuck Berry (played by Mos Def, who had worked with Beyoncé in Carmen: A Hip Hopera), Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), Howlin’ Wolf (Eammon Walker), and Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright in a true star turn). Since the earthy and profane James was to be just part of a large ensemble of characters, Beyoncé was able to take the role without much true criticism. Etta seeped into her very soul, so much so that she actually began to swear much more in her day-to-day after taking that challenging role . . . and she didn’t mind it at all.

  Darnell Martin, the movie’s writer and director, says he wrote the part of Etta James in the movie specifically for Beyoncé. “She was the dream to play Etta,” he told Smokey Fontaine for Giant magazine. The problem, though, was that Beyoncé was afraid of the part. She understood how much of a reach it would be for her, and the idea intimidated her. It was Tina who convinced her to take it.

  “She’d been saying for a long time that she wanted to stretch out and do something that was totally different,” Tina recalled. “Etta was down and dirty, she was tough. I felt like Beyoncé could kill it in that role. I knew she had it in her. She put up a little fight and said she didn’t think she’d have the time to devote to it. I said, ‘Well, it’s up to you, but you’re the one who has said you wanted to do something different. Here it is.’ ”

  In her film career to date, Beyoncé has had two roles that truly showed her depth as an actress—her very first, as Carmen Brown in Carmen: A Hip Hopera, in which director Robert Townsend coaxed her into an impressive and wide-ranging debut, and her work as Etta James in Cadillac Records, for which Darnell Martin helped her mine golden moments that nuanced her performance and saved it from drifting into caricature. Of course, her performances on torch songs such as “At Last” and “I’d Rather Go Blind” are stellar; that comes as no surprise. While they don’t exactly sound like Etta, they do evoke her pained sensibility as a vocalist. However, it’s Beyoncé acting, which is gritty and sometimes startling in its profanity, that demonstrates an organic ability seldom explored in her movie roles. She would tell Oprah Winfrey that it was her “most fulfilling role.”

  At this same time, in 2008, Beyoncé gave one of her greatest performances in a tribute to Barbra Streisand at the Kennedy Center Honors when she sang “The Way We Were.” The difference between Streisand and James is about as great a divide as one might find in our culture, yet Beyoncé was able to deliver the Streisand tribute with just as much conviction, authority, and genuine heart as anything she did in Cadillac Records. There’s no better demonstration of her amazing versatility than comparing these performances.

  Cadillac Records was a triumph; not so her next movie—and her last, to date—Obsessed.

  Filmed in the middle of 2008, mostly at Sony Pictures Studio in Culver City, California, Obsessed was likely better on paper in script form than it turned ou
t onscreen. The plot concerns a happily married couple, Derek and Sharon Charles—played by Idris Elba and Beyoncé—who are forced to deal with an unstable and delusional stalker, Lisa, portrayed by Ali Larter.

  Some might argue that the only reason to watch Obsessed (which was released in April 2009) is for the last ten minutes, during which Beyoncé’s character discovers the stalker in her home and engages in a bloody fight with her that is both stunning in its brutality and comical in its over-the-top moments. The fight ends in the attic where Beyoncé is forced to balance herself on four-inch stiletto heels on wooden beams rather than risk falling through the insulation to the ground floor—which is exactly what the stalker does. Poor crazy Lisa ends up on the floor down below, and just as she appears to be getting up for what promises to be round two, a chandelier falls on top of her, killing her. This fight—which the Washington Post called “a demolition-derby catfight”—won an MTV Award for “Best Fight Scene.”

  Lance Gilbert, the stunt coordinator for the film, recalled, “Because Beyoncé comes from a live stage environment that involves the need to learn hundreds of moves in dance sequences, she was able to pull off the fight scene. She was accustomed to applying her memory and her skill set to the learning of techniques. She approached it as if it were a long dance sequence. We obviously used stunt doubles for the girls, but they were still required to do a lot of very complex movement. There was some boxing, there was some martial arts. It wasn’t easy. When I taught her the headbutt, she was at first a little nervous about it. She read the script and was like, ‘My gosh . . . I don’t know’ . . . But then she really wanted to take advantage of it. It’s a dynamic move, and she made the best of it.”