ISBN: 1455516724
Read: April 2017
Rating: 6/10
Amazon page for more details and reviews.
I’m as fascinated by Beyonce’s creativity, hustle and business skills as I am by her artistry. This book is an unauthorised biography by J Randy Taraborrelli, and is mostly makes for quite mediocre reading compared to his bios on Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Still, I was able to extract quite a bit about the early days of Destiny’s Child and the “business strategy” behind the group, Beyonce’s work ethic and creative process, and the challenges and opportunities of building her own management company, Parkwood Entertainment.
My Notes
Early days and building the business of Destiny’s Child
On DC’s first manager Andretta Tillman “That was very much like my mom, ready to take on the world. So she bought a book called Music Industry 101 and she studied it night and day learning what she could, as fast as she could. That’s basically all she had: this doggone book, my dad’s dream, some ambition . . . and a whole lot of hope”
Young Beyonce “If she wasn’t “buckin’ so damn hard,” a very young Beyoncé could be found sitting alone, pensively writing song lyrics. “We used to have this exercise where we’d put the girls in a room and have them put pen to paper and try to write their own songs,” recalled Tony Mo. “One by one, each girl would give up and leave the room. I’d finally come into the room and Beyoncé would be the only one left. ‘I’m done,’ she’d say. ‘Well, cool, let me hear it,’ I’d tell her. And damn it if she hadn’t written a pretty decent song!”
“we started this program we called ‘Boot Camp,’ ” Tony Mo. recalled. “It was mostly Lonnie’s idea. He worked the girls hard every day, even having them sing while jogging so they wouldn’t get winded while dancing and singing onstage. We prepared hard for this convention.”
On Matthew Knowles “You had to hand it to him, because he was a black man living the American dream making good money and raising his family in this big ol’ house. He told me so many stories that inspired me about his growing up, the challenges he faced as a black man in the South, the way he had dealt with racism. He made me feel I could achieve anything in my life. My father died when I was about six, so, with Mathew, I sort of hung on to every word. Besides all of that, we also had a lot of fun in his house, too.”
Using adversity as fuel
“don’t know how, at the age of ten, she got it in her head to take adversity and use it as motivation. She just loved singing too much to let anyone stop her from doing it. Whatever the case, one thing was sure: There was just no stopping this kid. I remember her telling me, ‘People can say what they want about me, I’m still gonna sing.’ ”
“Beyoncé listened to everything her dad had to offer and soaked it up like a sponge”
“I’ve seen a lot of crying kids on this stage,” McMahon reportedly told Knowles. “And I can tell you that the ones who make it in the end are the ones who don’t quit. They go back and woodshed and reinvent themselves, and then they’re stronger for the loss, not weaker.”
“Every family in the public eye has to make a choice in terms of how much of their private lives they wish to reveal and what will ultimately service the image they are hoping to project. Beyoncé’s image has always been wholesome, fresh, and somehow upwardly mobile—certainly not troubled, not gritty, not steeped in adversity. Considering the Jackson family once again, though the Jackson 5 were a scrubbed-clean Motown confection, the family and their record company never tried to hide its gritty urban roots. The family’s dire financial situation was a big part of its success story. After all, “rags to riches” always works. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”
“the building of “Beyoncé” as a show business brand. It has to do with how a carefully constructed mythology about her family’s background might serve Beyoncé Knowles’s public image. Unlike the Jacksons, the Knowleses never wanted to be perceived as lower-class or impoverished. It was as if their strategy when Beyoncé became famous was to wipe the slate clean and start over again in their messaging to the public. In terms of public relations, they wanted to be frozen in time as the upper-middle-class family they’d been in the 1980s before their lives took such a dramatic turn for the worse.”
“Whether there was money available or not, it was spent on the girls,” Tina would later testify, referring to the singing group. “That was the problem, I guess. If my utility bill was $2,000 because I had six girls over all the time, and my grocery bill was high because I was feeding them every day of the week, I’m not going to complain about it. That was the choice I made. I’m just going to make it work. So we made it work. We had to make it work for the girls and for our family.”
Former members of early girl group Girls Tyme
“The fact that, to this day, none of us talk to Beyoncé still bothers us,” said Nina Taylor, also speaking for her sister. “For years, I kept thinking, was it really a sisterhood? Or was it just business? Because if it was just business, then I should have conducted myself in a different way. But as a little girl, you give your heart. You don’t know any better. You give everything you have, everything you are, and you just never think you’ll get hurt. Until one day . . . you do.”
“Daryl had always believed it beneficial to hold what he called “morale meetings” with his recording artists. Not only did he view them as a good way for his acts to express any concerns or problems they may have had, but he also looked at the meetings as an opportunity to boost their spirits”
“Since money was so tight, Tina worked harder than ever at Headliners. “My mama worked until she had calluses on her fingers and swollen feet,” Beyoncé said in 2011, “then she would find time to redecorate houses for her friends, and also make everyone’s prom and wedding dresses. She took me and Solange to our dance classes and recitals, cooked us delicious meals, and brought us to church. On Sunday, it was family day. She worked hard and never stopped.”
“I have always said that Beyoncé got her work ethic not from her father,” observed Pat Felton, “but from her mother.”
Music World Entertainment and signing Destiny’s Child
“a new partnership between Andretta, Kenny Moore, and Mathew Knowles would be formed, called Music World Entertainment, a venture that would see Mathew now getting the lion’s share of the profits”
“In order to give the record label a little more push, partners Knowles and Tillman decided to continue shopping for another deal, even if only to use it as leverage. As it happened, Polydor was keen on the idea of signing Destiny, especially considering D’Wayne Wiggins’s success there with Tony! Toni! Toné! Before anyone knew it, Polydor was actually drawing up contracts. After so much difficulty, Beyoncé’s group suddenly had two pending record deals. It was almost more than she and the others could comprehend”
“On October 15, 1995, with the paperwork under way at Polydor, Andretta telephoned Teresa LaBarbera Whites at Columbia/Sony to tell her that they’d decided to sign with another label. She was bluffing, hoping to get a rise out of Teresa. It worked. “Oh no you don’t!” exclaimed LaBarbera Whites. “No way! We are flying all of you to New York tomorrow to finalize the deal with us!”
“During their meeting with him, the label finalized a deal for Destiny that was much better than the one Polydor had offered. Now, just that fast—and so typical of the fickle record industry—Polydor was out and Columbia/Sony was in.”
“Destiny’s Child signed with Columbia/Sony for seven albums. According to a deal memo (with Beyoncé’s last name misspelled as “Knolls”), the budget for the first album was to be $85,000—not much in the record business. If the label were to continue with the group—and it had the option not to do so—the next album’s budget could be anywhere between $350,000 and $700,000. The third was between $375,000 and $750,000, and the scale continued to rise until the seventh album, the budget of which could be as high as $950,000”
“was also at about this time that Mathew and Andretta struck a new partnership deal, one that concerned the group’s royalties: Mathew would receive 15 percent, and Andretta just 5 percent. In exchange, Mathew said he would be responsible for 100 percent of the expenses, which is probably why Andretta agreed to a split that so favored him.”
“I saw a very meticulous fourteen-year-old girl,” Noel-Schure would later recall of meeting Beyoncé. [Actually, Beyoncé was probably fifteen, maybe sixteen, when they met]. “To be so in-the-know at that age—I remember coming back to Sony and saying, ‘This is my project. I’m gonna have the time of my life with these girls.’ ”
Noel-Schure added, “This is what I’m always gonna remember about Beyoncé: She takes you in. She looks you straight in your eyes when she’s talking to you. I said [to myself], ‘That is the trait of an honest person’—if you can look someone in the eye, a total stranger. In those days she was, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,’ to me, but she looked me right straight in the eye, did not blink, it seemed. I saw that boldness in her. To this day, when you talk to her, it’s the same thing. I always say, ‘Wow! You still do that.’ ” (Noel-Schure is still Beyoncé’s publicist all these years later.)”
“Imaging was very important to Destiny’s Child. The record label, on the other hand, kept saying we needed to put the girls in jeans and T-shirts. That’s what Britney Spears was wearing and that’s what they thought the girls should be looking like too. But we didn’t want that.”
Destiny’s Child always had great input with their appearance. They would tell Tina what they preferred and didn’t like, and were quite vocal about it. For instance, Kelly had an extremely small waist and enjoyed wearing midriff tops. Beyoncé had great legs and was always eager to show them off. The girls would cut out photographs of women in designs they enjoyed, and Tina would tape them on “inspiration boards” so that they could all agree on concepts”
Creating “The Writings on the Wall”
“In preparation for the group’s second opus, the girls sat down with pads and pens and made copious notes about what they liked about their debut recording, and what they weren’t quite as happy about. “Beyoncé told me that there were elements of the first album she thought were maybe too mature,” Daryl Simmons said. “She told me, ‘Shoot! We’re just teenagers. We want to have more fun than that.’ So there was definitely a concentrated effort to create an album that was younger in its appeal than the debut”
“My wife, Christi, was working as studio manager,” Dan Workman recalled, “and she came to me one day and said, ‘Do you know a guy named Mathew Knowles?’ I answered, ‘Nope, never heard of him.’ She goes, ‘Well, he’s on the phone and wants to book time for his daughter.’ This was very common, you know, dads wanting to book studio time for their kids’ little bands, or whatever. She said, ‘He’s insistent and he can’t believe we’ve never heard of his girl’s band.’ I said, ‘Well, what’s its name?’ And she said, ‘Destiny’s Child.’ ‘Never heard of ’em.’ She said they were signed to Columbia, Wyclef Jean had produced their first hit, and the label was going to be paying for the sessions. Well, all of that piqued my interest. Anytime it’s not the dad who’s paying for the sessions out of his own pocket, that’s good news. So I said, ‘Great, let’s bring her in”
“The way she intuitively used the microphone and asked for feedback showed a level of professionalism far beyond her years. She was even using terminology that was opaque to me. She’d say, ‘Okay, cool. Let’s start at the B section’ [the ‘bridge’ or ‘middle eight’ of a song].’ She also started schooling me on R&B music production, telling me how to double and triple different runs, copy and layer her vocals to make her one voice sound like a group of singers, all standard stuff in R&B, but I was this old rock-and-roll punk white guy who had never done soul music. While it felt a little weird having this teenager drive the session, she was so good I was blown away by the whole thing”
“Much of The Writing’s on the Wall was written on the spot, while DC was in the studio recording it. Often the process was as impromptu as Beyoncé reaching into a stash of CDs of instrumental tracks that had been submitted by various producers and giving several of them a listen. She’d then decide which ones to complete by adding to them a vocal melody and lyric right there on the spot, sometimes with the help of the other girls. Then the group would instantly record what they’d come up with. It was a strange way of making records (and an even stranger way of writing songs). In a normal scenario, the song would already be written, its lyrics handed to the artist in the recording booth. Then, as the artist sang over the prerecorded track, a producer would oversee the endeavor. This standard process happened sometimes too, but for the most part Beyoncé and Destiny’s Child charted their own course in the studio.
“The way these girls worked was totally unique to me,” Dan Workman said. “They would come, take off their coats, kick off their shoes, make themselves at home in the studio, and write songs right[…]”
“Beyoncé was headstrong, knew precisely what she wanted, and usually made sure she got it. Mathew, of course, was never easygoing either. If anything, the two were exactly alike.”
“In her subsequent conversation with Mathew, Kim realized he had a wide range of plans for Destiny’s Child, from TV appearances to live concerts and recordings. “He sat on one side of his desk, I was on the other, and he laid out his ideas for the group, but more precisely for Beyoncé,” Kim recalled of Mathew. “ ‘I want to keep her voice in great shape,’ he told me, ‘because the demands on it for the next few years are going to be great. I like that you are concerned about longevity,’ he told me, ‘because that’s my concern, too. Kelly, too. I have plans for her as well. Both girls need to be on point.’ ”
“Kelly had the same work ethic as Beyoncé. She was focused and had such joy about what she was doing.”
“By the time we got to ‘Say My Name,’ for instance, it was Beyoncé doing most of the heavy lifting with Kelly filling in some parts. I remember hearing a playback and asking, ‘Is that LaTavia?’ and Kevin would say, ‘Nope. Beyoncé.’ A little later, I would ask, ‘LeToya?’ and he would answer, ‘Nope. Beyoncé.’ ”
LaTavia and LeToya Exit
“LaTavia and LeToya were like sisters to her,” people around her kept saying, “and that’s why she’s devastated by their leaving the group.” That was the way everyone seemed to look at it. “Because they are so close,” they kept repeating, “she is going to miss them so much.” Either they didn’t completely understand Beyoncé Knowles or, again, they were trying to protect what they thought was her image, because in truth, the emotions she felt were more complex than just feelings of longing for her defected singing partners.”
“Then there was the matter of songs. Because Beyoncé had already begun writing for the next Destiny’s Child album, she had a group sound in mind. Writing for solo performances was a very different task. Maybe going solo at this time was too soon, too rushed?
The next day, Beyoncé made her decision. First, she called the group’s attorney Ken Hertz to give him the news. Then she faxed a formal letter to Don Ienner, the president of her record label. Her decision? She was leaving Destiny’s Child. She was sorry to see the group disband, but felt it was inevitable.”
“Perhaps LaTavia and LeToya didn’t fully grasp as much when they chose to disaffirm their contracts, but Mathew Knowles actually owned Destiny’s Child. When LeToya earlier wondered, “When did our group become his group?” the answer was: when he trademarked the name. Legally, he could put anyone in the act he wanted, replacing all the girls if that was his desire”
“In the fickle record industry, it took no time at all to go from the top of the charts right down to the bottom simply because of one bad decision. He’d seen it happen repeatedly, simply as an observer of the business. “I remember him saying, ‘Whatever it takes, I am going to protect what my daughter and I built together,”
“I remember an interview we did where Beyoncé said, ‘We have a job to do, a responsibility to each other. We show up. If you don’t show up, unfortunately you lose your job. It’s that simple.’ I remember thinking how tough it must be to, on one hand, befriend these girls but, on the other, be equipped to let them go if necessary.”
Solange:
“She beats to a different drummer,” is how Mathew put it in speaking of Solange, who, like Beyoncé, says, “I was fortunate to grow up in a mecca of incredible women.” She later told writer Michael Hall, “I never defined myself by my sister. I have my own musical ideas, and marketing ideas, and imaging ideas. I have had arguments with my dad about the meaning of success”
Album 3, “Survivor”
“By the time we got to the third album, it was really just Beyoncé doing the writing and producing,” recalled Workman. As he remembered it, now there were no other producers in the room, at least not on the sessions he engineered. He recalled that Beyoncé would always come into the studio with a stack of CDs of tracks she’d been listening to at the time. She’d receive dozens of these tracks on a weekly basis, all submitted to her by various producers around the country who wanted to participate in a Destiny’s Child project. After reviewing them, she’d select her favorites. She would write lyrics for the melodies she had chosen, and then enter the studio and put it all together—her lyrics with the tracks. Often she would add elements to the track herself, maybe go back in and make adjustments to what she’d been sent—which might require bringing musicians into the studio. In that case, she would end up with a producer’s credit.”
“Though Fusari would be credited on the final product, he and Beyoncé would never actually be in the same room together while coming up with those lyrics, which was not unusual given her hectic schedule. These days a lot of songs were cowritten with people on the other end of a phone line”
“Beyoncé sat with her legs crossed Indian-style on the wooden effects console behind Workman and began fine-tuning the lyrics, putting pencil to pad: “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly / ’cause my body’s too bootylicious.” As she did so, Kelly Rowland passed the time by watching Forrest Gump on a portable DVD player. Michelle wasn’t present. “We laughed when Kelly started calling me Lieutenant Dad, after the Gary Sinise character in the movie,” Workman recalled.”
Crafting “Bootylicious”
“Dan Workman says he, Beyoncé, and Kelly spent about eleven hours in the studio on this one song. “Beyoncé spent ten of those hours writing lyrics and recording lead vocals. She would record three-part background harmony with just her own voice, and then double it—then you’d have six voices. She would stack it, and you would have layer upon layer of her voice. Then she’d listen to the playback of all those Beyoncé voices and say, ‘You know, that one take, in the middle, that second one? I need to do that one over again. I made a mistake there. My inflection wasn’t quite the same as the others, and my breath was a little different.’ I would then isolate her voice on that one little bit and, sure enough, it would be just a tad different than the rest of the takes. However, in the totality of sound, no way could I have heard the discrepancy. Her ear was just so finely tuned, she could pick out a slightly different inflection in a whole sea of sounds. I’ve never before seen or heard of anybody have that degree of acuity and memory and, you know, savant[…]”
“After Beyoncé pretty much had all of “Bootylicious” recorded with just her voice on all the parts, she sent Kelly into the studio. She stripped her lead vocal from most of the track and had Kelly record those sections herself. As she replaced her voice with Kelly’s, she directed her friend every step of the way. Kelly by this time was her own kind of accomplished singer; she recorded the whole song in less than an hour. “She really knocked it out of the ballpark,” recalled Dan Workman. “She ended up with most of the song, actually. Michelle came into the studio later and also recorded a small bit in the middle.”
“She knew how to get the best from people by allowing them to also be invested in the work. I had seen that method work so well with ZZ Top, and she did it even better because it was coming from a girl who wasn’t even twenty-one! She was so talented she didn’t need anything from me but to just shut up and push the levers up and down on the console. Yet when we left the studio that day, after eleven hours together, it felt like my victory too.”
“Actually, 8Bit had always intended to replace the Nicks sample anyway. The only reason it was even on the instrumental track he had submitted to Beyoncé was because he couldn’t find his old cassette of Survivor’s 1982 hit “Eye of the Tiger.” He’d originally wanted to use the opening guitar riff from that song, but as just a placemark”
Soundbites vs Credits:
“One night, 8Bit was watching Beyoncé being interviewed by Barbara Walters on television when she said she’d heard the Steve Nicks riff on an airplane and was thus inspired to write “Bootylicious.” 8Bit thought that a more accurate explanation of what had occurred would have been that he had submitted to her a track he composed for her consideration, and that it included the Stevie Nicks sample . . . which then inspired her to cowrite “Bootylicious.” However, after years of doing television interviews, Beyoncé understood the merit of a good, economical sound bite. In show business, the truth often lies not in the facts but in the telling. The way she described the process was the simplest, easiest way to go about it. Still, 8Bit couldn’t help but feel slighted. He reached out to Mathew, calling him on the telephone.”
“it would have been nice if she could have said she cowrote the song, or coproduced it.”
Mathew laughed. “Are you kidding me?” he asked, “What business are you in? Nobody cares about Ron Fusari from Livingston, New Jersey,” he said. “That’s not what sells records. They want to believe it’s all the artist. That’s the person they’re listening to. That’s the person in front. It’s not about you. What’s the matter with you?”
Years later, 8-Bit recalls, “Obviously, I wasn’t looking for Beyoncé to hold up a big banner that said, ‘Hey, everyone! Guess what? “Bootylicious” was cowritten and coproduced by Rob Fusari!’ That said, I was being totally naïve, immature, and wet behind the ears. I think I’d just been taken off guard by her interview. I’d been so excited to be producing alone [without his partner Vince Herbert] that I let my enthusiasm for it run wild. But Mathew was right. That’s exactly how this business works. Looking back, it was a total mistake to call him about it,” 8Bit concludes. “He and I were never quite the same after that.”
“She told her daughter that one day someone would probably say far worse about her. In fact, she said she could guarantee it. “You know who you are, I know who you are, everyone here knows who you are, and God knows who you are,” Tina said. “That’s got to be enough.” She said that if Beyoncé wanted more than that in terms of acceptance, she would be in for a lot of heartache.”
“Beyoncé would really smash on Mathew,” Lonnie would recall years later, “and be aggressive with him. This was their dynamic together, though. Everyone knew that she wasn’t intimidated by him.”
“Beyoncé, though, couldn’t help but want to know a little bit about everyone else’s purpose; she was intrigued by—and very determined about—trying to influence as much of it as possible, especially the sound and the way it was mixed as it was being transmitted to her audience. Lighting cues were also an important concern of hers.”
Jay-Z
“If Jay did have his sights set on Beyoncé, he couldn’t have selected a person more unlike himself. Certainly one of the aspects of his life that Beyoncé couldn’t really relate to was his materialistic side. For him, everything was about money, and he would be the first to admit it. With his designer clothes, his platinum and gold jewelry, his private jets . . . everything about Jay spelled out success, in arguably the most crass, blatant terms. But that’s the hip-hop world in a nutshell, really. The culture is all about materialistic excess”
“Jay has been motivated by money,” observed Choke No Joke (whose real name is Arthur Alston); he worked as Damon Dash’s videographer for Roc-A-Fella Records from 2000 to 2005. “Beyoncé is motivated by the challenge and the thrill of victory, not by money. You never hear her brag about money. I mean, she may name-drop some handbags, perfume, stuff like that in her lyrics, but her world does not revolve around materialism and riches, like Jay’s. You couldn’t even tell me what kind of car she drives.”
“Obviously, there are people in his life who feel let down by Jay, which is not unusual—as Chad Elliott points out—in the lives of people who came from nothing, forged relationships with friends of similar circumstances, and then went on to great success. Jay Z was never one to look back. He is nothing if not a self-invented man; nobody ever gave him anything, his success is hard-earned. To become a phenomenon in the record business, he implemented much of the same skill set that made him a successful drug dealer, such as his ability to read people and intuit the next, best course of action. He has also been incredibly philanthropic; untold millions of his have gone toward his charitable efforts. Along with his drive and ambition, he is a master media strategist. Nothing is ever left to chance when it comes to his public image. “He is always thinking two steps ahead of everyone else,” concluded Jaz-O. “If you think anything is ever an accident in terms of what you’re seeing from Jay Z, you’d be wrong.”
“We exchanged audiences,” Jay would later recall to Rolling Stone. “Her records are huge Top 40 records, and she helped ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ go to number one. What I gave her was a street credibility, a different edge.”
“In terms of his audience, Jay got more out of the bargain than she did. Anyone who questions that she upgraded him wasn’t watching their careers from the beginning. There’s no question that she helped him get more revenue by putting her brand next to his.”
“He’d had a pop hit with ‘Hard Knock Life’ but he was still in the demo of the urban community,” he recalled of Jay. “Aligning himself with Beyoncé, the cream of the crop of not just R&B but also the pop world, brought Jay Z into a whole other light with a whole new audience. When he got with Beyoncé, that’s when you started seeing him wear suits, for instance, instead of baggy pants and baseball caps. It started slowly, but it definitely built between 2003 and 2005. That’s when Jay started presenting himself in an entirely different way.”
First Solo Album, Dangerously in Love
“For Beyoncé’s part, she wanted to create an album that reflected her growth and ambition as a singer, writer, and producer.
To find the best writers and producers to assist in her musical vision, Beyoncé spent two days personally interviewing potential collaborators from both coasts. She knew exactly what she wanted, too”
“She’d earned the respect of male collaborators for three reasons: First, she knew what she wanted; second, she wasn’t afraid to say so; and third, her ideas consistently translated into hits”
“They told me I didn’t have one hit on the album,” Beyoncé would later say. “I guess they were kinda right. I had five.” It was a joke in her act, but in truth Beyoncé would never forget Columbia/Sony’s initial doubts about her. As she moved forward with both Destiny’s Child and her solo projects, her subsequent actions—how she dealt with Columbia/Sony, her guarded faith in the label’s belief in her, and her quest for control over how she was marketed and promoted—would reflect the label’s original ambivalence about her debut album.”
Crazy in Love
“Most every successful songwriter, no matter how much in demand, has a song or two he is holding back for just the right act. For Harrison, that song was an idea he envisioned building around a sample he treasured from “Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)”
“Beyoncé actually thought the track sounded a little too old-school. “No one’s using horn sounds today,” she reasoned. Indeed, Beyoncé was reaching for what sounded current and hot in 2002, and in her opinion that didn’t include horns.
However, after a couple more listens to Harrison’s little sample, Beyoncé’s reticence began to ebb. An explosive stage performer by nature, maybe she was seduced by the sheer excitement of the music: It was big, exhilarating, and action-packed. It felt like . . . showtime. It was in Beyoncé’s expression of concentration that Harrison found the hope he so desperately sought.”
“As the two discussed his work, Beyoncé happened to glance at herself in a mirror. Dressed casually with her hair not perfectly coiffed, she remarked out loud, to no one in particular, “Oh my God! I’m looking so crazy right now.”
“Hey! That’s the hook!” Harrison exclaimed”
“Beyoncé called Jay, who came to the studio at about three in the morning. Loving what he heard, he walked into the sound booth, put on headphones, and recorded his largely improvised rap verse in a matter of just minutes.”
Brand Building
“If the ability to be an icon is contingent on creating iconography, it involves the creation of a character that can be digestible to the world. That character is a version of the person who created it, but certainly not the true self. Most celebrities put forth an image that isn’t really who they are in their private lives. Sometimes the image doesn’t get in the way of the person’s true identity because the two are so closely aligned. Madonna comes to mind. Her brazen stage persona is very closely connected to who she actually is in the real world”
“By 2004, Beyoncé had entered the stage of her career where she wanted to know everything there was to know about the business behind it. Who better to teach her than her own father?
People have always looked for some sort of complex business plan when it came to the saturation of the Beyoncé brand, but it’s not there. Mathew Knowles is an everyman sort of entrepreneur. While everything he did was of course structured and strategized, all of it sprang from his grassroots mentality as a salesman. It utilized the same philosophy that made him flourish in the many sales jobs he took on before Girls Tyme:Give the people what they want, give them plenty of it, and make sure the product is good so they keep coming back for me. By 2004, he’d made his daughter absolutely ubiquitous, bringing in untold amounts of money for everyone concerned: the product . . . the group . . . his family.”
“There seemed to be no end to the ways Mathew envisioned exposing Beyoncé to the masses, great ideas such as when he had her sing the national anthem before almost ninety million people at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in February 2004. A week later, Mathew had her perform “Crazy in Love” during halftime at the NBA All-Star Game. By this time, she had replaced Britney Spears in television commercials for Pepsi. She was also linked to the Tommy Hilfiger brand as well as L’Oreal, representing products used by a cross-section of consumers, with nothing offensive or the least bit controversial. Later she would become a spokeswoman for Samsung and American Express. There was also a Wal-Mart commercial that showed the girls of Destiny’s Child and the Knowleses exchanging Christmas gifts. There were countless foreign commercials, too, such as one in Egypt for Pepsi featuring Beyoncé with Jennifer Lopez as samurai sword-wielding martial artists. The group also partnered with many corporations for tour sponsorships, such as DC’s “I’m Lovin’ It” tour sponsored by McDonald’s, which featured the girls in commercials.”
“Knowles told Michael Hall for Texas Monthly,“When you sell a product, you first have to design and build it, but also you have to figure out the needs of the customer. When we put the group together, we had a plan. We figured out our demographic, our customers, our imaging, what type of songs we’re going to sing. It’s not by accident that we write songs like ‘Independent Women’ and ‘Survivor’—female-based empowerment songs. That’s our customer base.” Of course, those song ideas were Beyoncé’s, not his, but as her manager Mathew wasn’t above sometimes taking universal credit”
“Despite the careful planning that went into Beyoncé’s career, there would always be the occasional unfortunate misstep. Nothing was more incongruous, for instance, than seeing her pose with a box of Hamburger Helper”
“Certainly her film The Fighting Temptations (released in the fall of 2003) also falls into that category of miscalculations. Whereas Carmen: A Hip Hopera gave Beyoncé a meaty and multidimensional role, and Austin Powers had her playing off the campiness of her Foxxy Brown character, The Fighting Temptations gave her pretty much nothing; the character she played was just a pretty young woman who could sing”
“Often Beyoncé’s cousin Angie would sit in on these business meetings with Mathew. She was wise to the finer points of show business, having been on the road with Destiny’s Child for years. She taught Beyoncé to be tough and ask questions, to not take anything for granted. “I don’t want people to get the impression that I think they’re lying,” Beyoncé would say. “Well, guess what, girl? They probably are,” Angie would tell her. Many people who were on the road with Destiny’s Child have stories of the two cousins sequestered in one of their hotel rooms, reviewing accounting books and contracts”
“she was becoming the kind of entertainer who felt comfortable challenging even the most experienced person.”
“So how did Beyoncé square this abundant commercialization of her image with who she really was as a person—the icon versus the person? In 2004, she hadn’t quite figured that out yet. She was still trying to create a balance between what she wanted the public to think of her and who she really was as a young woman. It’s one of the reasons she never said much of a personal nature in interviews. It was fine with her if the public only knew of her what they saw in her endorsement deals. If all she was to her fans was a sexy girl in a poster, that was completely acceptable to her”
“A cautious person by nature, Beyoncé had long before decided that rather than make the wrong statement about herself, she’d make none at all except those concerning her professional aspirations and a few platitudes now and again about how blessed she was to have her career. While she didn’t appear to be very insightful, that was primarily because she was purposely vague, each response measured against its possible ramifications. In a sense it had to do with public relations, because she definitely had an image she was putting forth, but it also had to do with something else: fear of exposure.”
“Today, she still has critics who feel that she is disingenuous, or just plain “fake.” If she comes across that way—and she sometimes does—it’s really just a function of her being evasive by design”
“Though Beyoncé never forgot Oprah’s words, she actually had been withholding parts of herself ever since she was a child, back when the other kids in school didn’t even know she was a singer. She was raised to compartmentalize, to not share of herself, to protect her heart at all costs. “This business sucks every goddamn thing out of you,” she once told Lyndall Locke. “I’m going to keep as much of myself for myself as I can. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to give it all away. I don’t care what people think about it, either.”
Dreamgirls
“For Beyoncé, Dreamgirls may have proved to be a humbling experience. “This was tough goin’ for her,” said someone who knew her well at the time. “On one hand, she’s this humble person, and no one disputes that about her. On the other, she has an ego like every other superstar in her position. So to have a blockbuster movie like this one ripped out from under her by a novice like Jennifer Hudson wasn’t easy.”
“this conclusion was nothing new for her, not after so many years in a fickle business. However, it had been quite some time since she’d been reminded of it. To say she was very disturbed about Dreamgirls would probably be overstating things. Perhaps one of the saving graces about her career is that she’s so relentlessly busy, she usually has little time to dwell on anything upsetting. It would be more accurate to say that she was thrown by it, surprised by it, dismayed by it . . . and anxious to forget about it.”
B’day
“in late March 2006, about a month into a planned vacation, she told Jay that she was itching to get back to work. Destiny’s Child had just received their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and after the ceremony, Beyoncé said she was thinking of recording a new album. He had to understand that she needed her work. She was too driven, too focused to just put it aside for long. If he wanted to be with her, he would have to make the necessary adjustments; singing and performing was always going to be a big part of the life and times of Beyoncé Knowles. As an artist himself, he could relate, and he loved her enough to work it all out in his head.”
“She would later explain that the reason she didn’t tell him of her plans was because she wasn’t sure she was actually making a recording for release, that maybe she was just recording demos for future consideration, which she did all the time.”
“Working with a variety of producers and songwriters on one project was nothing new for Beyoncé; of course, that’s how Destiny’s Child records were made, as well as her debut solo album. However, for this record she decided to book every studio at the Sony facility in New York, and then have all of her producers and songwriters work on their respective tracks concurrently, while she went from room to room to work with them on different songs. She wanted the energy and excitement of that sort of mass creativity to be happening all at once.”
“The songs that would end up on B’Day, released on September 4, 2006—Beyoncé’s twenty-fifth birthday—were recorded in roughly two weeks.
What was exciting about B’Day—the spontaneity of its production—also proved to be its detriment. The project wasn’t allotted the scrutiny of an objective overseeing ear. Indeed, by 2006, one of the misfortunes of Beyoncé’s career was that it wasn’t afforded the direction of a seasoned executive producer. Beyoncé and Mathew were the executive producers—as always—and by this time it was beginning to seem that the duo was maybe a little out of its depth. It’s not known how much input Beyoncé let her father have on B’Day, but word in the street was: not much. Because Mathew was always known to have a more commercial ear than Beyoncé, she definitely could have used a little more of his input on the album”
“the pool of writers and producers from which Beyoncé selected her collaborators was talented. However, many of them were shortsighted in their ambitions, their skills not venturing beyond the realm of hip-hop and/or so-called neo-soul forms. By her second solo album, a music career the mammoth size of Beyoncé’s was still sorely missing a signature song, an uptempo number or memorable ballad the whole world could sing. “Crazy in Love” was close, but some critics still didn’t feel it would stand the test of time. Finding such a song is among the duties of an executive producer who is not the artist, an entity able to stand outside the project and know what it’s missing”
Work Ethic
“Like her father, she had an obsessive temperament when it came to work; she simply couldn’t relax. She always had so much to do, and she was determined to get it all done, no matter what it took. Her career was hard work, but that had always been true. It had definitely paid off for her. She’d never been surprised by her success, either. It had always felt somehow preordained. “How would you like me to describe you?” Australian television personality Liam Bartlett asked her in a March 2007 interview. “A legend in the making,” she quickly answered. He was a little taken aback. “A legend?” he asked. She nodded and said, “Yeah.” He smiled. “That’s big,” he remarked. “I said, ‘in the making,’” she clarified. By 2007, all modesty aside, it did seem that the way she and Mathew had thus far masterminded her career was definitely one for the record books.”
“She’s completely relentless in her pursuit of perfectionism,” her creative director, Todd Tourso, would say in years to come. “It sounds cheesy, but that’s why I’m willing to work so hard for her. When you have this type of leadership and muse and mentor, the sky’s the limit.”
“I had a friend attend a rehearsal, and afterwards, he said to me, ‘Wow. She can be a real pain in the ass, can’t she?’” said one member of her crew. “‘She’s so anal! How do you deal with it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, she can be tough, all right. But she’s as tough on herself as she is on everyone else, tougher even.”
“I’m still trying to learn that I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself and be so critical and [that] I can smell the roses,” she would later say. “I don’t want to never be satisfied. I don’t think that’s a healthy way to live.”
“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.”
“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.”
I Am Sasha Fierce
“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 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.”
Parkwood Entertainment
“As an artist, Beyoncé was almost always thinking of new concepts for songs, for video shoots, photo layouts, and concerts”
“Parkwood employees are often in the dark about what is going on with the boss. Beyoncé always keeps a tight rein on information, allowing only those with an urgent need to know the details of whatever secret project happens to be in the works”
“When they eventually do find out what has been going on behind the scenes, it’s often a big surprise and is viewed as yet another Parkwood adventure. No one holds Beyoncé’s secretive nature against her. They all realize that it’s in their best interest if they don’t know exactly what’s going on, especially if it’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Though the Knowles women were short on detail and big on cryptic statements, it was abundantly clear that a seismic shift was about to occur in their lives.”
Firing her father
“When she was younger, Beyoncé may well have viewed all of her fellow singers who disagreed with Mathew as just standing in the way of her own success. She might even have thought of them as naïve and maybe even foolish; they just didn’t know how lucky they were, at least in her youthful opinion. It’s not as if she fought hard for Ashley Davis or Nicki and Nina Taylor, LeToya Luckett, or even LaTavia Roberson. But now, so many years later in 2011, she couldn’t help but reconsider their motives. Now, as an adult, Beyoncé had to wonder: Weren’t these women just standing up for their own goals and desires against Mathew’s different vision . . . and losing”
“Mathew also stated that no sooner had Beyoncé fired him than she had signed with Live Nation to promote her next tour. He said he found that timing to be very suspicious. “This [Beyoncé’s new deal with Live Nation] has resulted in a benefit to Live Nation of millions of dollars,” he noted. He concluded that, based on the way Live Nation had recently been diversifying its interests, the company now stood in line not only to promote her next tour but maybe even to manage her. He wanted to depose anyone from that firm who might have had anything to do with her decision. He also demanded to see and review with his own accountants all of the results of Beyoncé’s audit.”
“At the same time that Mathew was fired, Faisal Duranni, a top executive at Live Nation, took on the role of president of Beyoncé’s management and production company, Parkwood Entertainment—which Mathew says he also found suspicious”
4
“Beyonce’s album 4, which would be released in June 2011, is well worth listening to in that it acts as a sort of creative bridge between her recording career with Mathew Knowles at the helm and the one she would have on her own without him. In fact, it’s her first album on which Mathew is not co-credited with her as an executive producer. Some seventeen writers and producers worked on the project, which was recorded over a year’s time.
Like its predecessor, I Am . . . Sasha Fierce, which was purposely designed to be accessible to the masses, 4 features the sorts of songs best produced by Beyoncé under Mathew’s tutelage”
“Also in this same league is “Run the World (Girls),” an amalgamation of beats and chants. It’s difficult to believe that Mathew would have approved of either of these compositions. He likely would have revolted against their overt lack of commercially. In Beyoncé’s defense, though, she was obviously serving up material that would satisfy her own urge to create at will without worrying about how it would be interpreted by others—an understandable impulse, especially at this time of such great discontentment and upheaval in her life.”
“Released in June 2011, 4—like the Beyoncé albums before it—debuted at number one. While it won its share of awards—among them R&B Album of the Year at the 2012 Billboard Music Awards—it sold “only” three million in sales internationally, a little more than a million of that in America. It was actually Beyoncé’s weakest showing as a solo artist. Amazingly enough, the album’s standout cut, “Love on Top,” peaked only at number twenty in the United States. (It did win a Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance, though.) The album’s final single, “End of Time,” didn’t even make the charts.
Some in Beyoncé’s life suggest that the infrastructure at her Parkwood Entertainment wasn’t yet completely stabilized and ready to fully function in support of 4. It seemed that at the very least, Beyoncé would have to get used to making promotional decisions once made by Mathew. She would have help, of course—especially from Jay—but she had wanted to be on her own, have the final authority over her career, and now that she had gotten her wish, she’d have to sink or swim.”
“As well as choosing the right path to chart without Mathew, there were a great many other matters for her to start handling, such as budgets for videos, future recordings, photo shoots, and the planning of the next tour, always a huge undertaking. Also important was Parkwood’s ongoing working relationship with Columbia/Sony, which seemed to not be at its most efficient with 4. All of these behind-the-scenes machinations were now under Beyoncé’s purview, responsibilities some skeptics thought might crush her now that they were to fall on her slim shoulders. It was a frightening prospect. Could she do it all without her dad? She wasn’t sure. She only knew she had to try.”
Capturing everything on video
“since 2005 she has had a “visual director” film of many of her waking hours. Like Michael Jackson, who also had what he called a “videographer” documenting his life and times, she believes that there is some value to be found in almost every moment. Certainly Jay understands; he has had his own videographers; Choke No Joke comes to mind. In a broader sense, it could be said that not only is Beyoncé hounded by paparazzi, but she has pretty much hired her own to trail her—with her permission. Thus all of the photos and video footage of her and Jay walking on the beach, or shopping, or eating at a restaurant, or just living their lives, makes one wonder: Do these people ever have a truly private moment? Almost everything they do is filmed and then carefully cataloged in what Beyoncé calls “my crazy archive” in her Manhattan office.”
“Untold man-hours go into making certain that footage of Beyoncé and her family can be located in a moment’s notice, whether for her own enjoyment or perhaps for an authorized documentary or for use in her act, such as the family album montage shown at the end of Beyoncé and Jay’s show during their 2014 On the Run Tour. Copies of almost every photo she has ever taken going all the way back to Girls Tyme can also be found in temperature-controlled archives. Moreover, most of Beyoncé’s press interviews are also filmed; it’s usually required that the journalist agree to this provision before sitting down with her. Amy Wallace of GQ wrote about showing up for an interview with Beyoncé only to find the star already seated in front of a camera, her framing carefully prearranged so much so that she couldn’t even rise to say hello lest she ruin the shot. Jo Ellison told the same sort of tale about her cover story on Beyoncé in Vogue.”
“You know, it’s funny,” she concluded, “but when you take the time to think about it and really analyze your life, you realize that all of the dots are connected and that all of it somehow makes perfect sense.”
“She even has someone called a “brand manager” at her Parkwood Entertainment management company, Melissa Vargas. “Being her brand manager, I know what levels she is willing to expose and what she’s not,” says Vargas. “And she’s a very, very private person.”
“Life is But a Dream” Documentary
“The film opened with footage and platitudes about the home Beyoncé and her family shared in the Third Ward of Houston. “I remember the moss on the trees,” she said. “That house is my foundation.” Of course, the most interesting aspect of the story behind this house isn’t the moss on the trees that surround it, it’s the fact that the family had to sell it rather than lose it at foreclosure since all of their money had been spent on furthering Beyoncé’s career. With the absence of this subtext, it quickly became clear that she would not be putting forth the whole truth for public consumption, just parts of it.”
“The vast majority of critics agreed with the Times. Writing for the New Yorker, Judy Rosen observed, “Life Is But a Dream purports to offer a behind-the-scenes look at Beyoncé’s life, but the nature of modern-pop mega stardom—the nature of Beyoncé herself—ensures that nothing will be exposed; the curtain is yanked back to reveal another curtain.”
Focusing on her Superfans
“If there were any missteps with Life Is But a Dream, they didn’t matter to her devoted (and extremely protective) fan base, which has in recent years become known as “the Beyhive.” Indeed, as long as she can keep the “hive” satisfied, maybe she needn’t worry about her critics
“She also didn’t want to allow herself to become comfortable with the weight she’d gained. She even booked a concert three months after the birth, as if to give herself a deadline. Then she went strict and she went hard, not only with her dieting but with her workout regimen. She did reach her goal, but looking back on it now she feels that her anxiety about it was totally unnecessary. If she has another baby, she’s decided, she will take it easy afterward. “I’ll give myself more time,” she said, “because it was just not necessary to do it that fast.”
In the studio
“Beyoncé’s solitary moments in the recording studio are much needed and appreciated. It’s where she finds her greatest sense of serenity. Far away from the pressing crowds of her life, the small, confined space of a recording booth in front of a single microphone is where she’s truly free to be herself, to concentrate fully on what she most loves to do, be exasperated by its many maddening flaws, and finally exhilarated by its carefully crafted perfection. All of it is a process privately conducted at a remove from prying and critical eyes. As an artist, she has always reveled in the creation of her music and has even admitted that she often finds the process more liberating and satisfying than the actual delivery of the product to the world for its final judgment. Obviously such solitary moments in the studio are also primarily responsible for her phenomenal success. After all, where would Beyoncé Knowles Carter be without her songs?”
“Beyoncé spends untold hours in the studio recording music she’d been working on for days, months, and even years, tinkering with the lyrics, the melody, the orchestration, trying to shape it in an effort to see if it’s even worth sharing with her public”
“There’s multiple albums being made. Most of the time, we’re just being creative, period. We’re talking about Bey, somebody who sings all day long and somebody who writes all day long. There’s probably a hundred records just sitting around.” Indeed, it’s safe to say that many thousands of dollars are spent every year producing songs that will never find their way into the marketplace, tunes that didn’t rise to the high standards Beyoncé has set for herself over the years. For the Carters, going into the studio together is one of their favorite pastimes. Over the years, Jay has produced many dozens of songs for Beyoncé that the public has never heard. Not only is their time together in the studio a creative outlet for them, but it’s also a way for them to wind down and relax.”
BEYONCÉ, the secret album
“For her next album, Beyoncé realized that she couldn’t simply release another collection of well-produced but typical songs into the marketplace and then hope for the best. She would have to do something that would raise eyebrows, cause a sensation, and, maybe if she was lucky, even break a few barriers. Now more than ever, she needed to make a real statement about herself and her artistry. The stakes were high, and she knew it. “I have a lot to prove with this one, not to just everyone else but to myself,” she said privately at this time. “I’m not blind to it. I know it, and I know what I have to do.”
“To Beyoncé, can’t pretty much always means can.”
“Her innovative idea was fascinating on another level because it showed an “old school” mentality that was probably, ironically enough considering the circumstances of her recent life, influenced by Mathew. She would note that back in the 1980s (and certainly before), an artist was judged by its audience based on an entire album, not just a few songs. But today, thanks to the Internet age of downloading music, fans don’t have the opportunity to listen to a comprehensive work in total. As the listener points and clicks his way through the music, he’s missing out on the chance to have a song actually grow on him, or to discover something about it he may have missed in the first few listenings.”
“Maybe she was “crazy,” but she was also the boss, and so during the summer of 2012, Beyoncé’s eccentric plan went into full-blown execution mode. The first thing that happened was that she and Jay rented a large home in the Hamptons on Long Island. She had a studio set up there, and then she invited about a dozen songwriters and musicians to come stay with her and Jay to write and record on whim. The idea was that she could kick back with her husband and their new child, and at the same time knock around musical ideas—“a working vacation.” A house staff and chef were hired so that guests would be free to do whatever they liked—swim, play games, or simply relax—as long as they were also making music. In some ways, it was how she had recorded B’Day, with everyone working together at the same time at the Sony studio in New York, except now everyone had his own bedroom and private bath in a five-star setting.”
“Since everyone had careers to tend to and couldn’t spend weeks on end at the Hamptons house, recording there eventually folded, and later in 2013 moved to Jungle City Studios in Manhattan. The project gained momentum when Jay introduced Beyoncé to Jordy “BOOTS” Asher, a young songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who had fronted and/or worked with several indie rock bands. Meanwhile, Beyoncé continued working with other songwriters and musicians, names she’d collaborated with before such as Ryan Tedder and Pharrell Williams, as well as names that were new to a Beyoncé production, such as Dwane “Key Wane” Weir, who would coproduce for the Beyoncé project the provocative “Partition,” and Chauncey “Hit-Boy” Hollis, who collaborated with Beyoncé and others to create “Jealous,” “XO,” and “Flawless.”
“After the songs were recorded, videos had to be produced for all of them, again under the same cloak of secrecy. The dancers who appeared in the videos didn’t even know exactly what they were filming, or why. All of the work was done while Beyoncé was on the road, and so as the dancers traveled by bus from one destination to the other, they talked among themselves, wondering exactly what was going on, but also knowing not to ask any questions to anyone in charge”
“It was actually thrilling,” says Tenesha Ksyn Cason, a.k.a. Miss Ksyn. “We knew the song titles, but we didn’t know how or when or even in what form the videos would be coming out. It was a tough schedule, too. I remember we were performing in Mexico during the South American leg of the Mrs. Carter tour. We flew from Mexico to Houston to shoot the beginning of the ‘Blow’ and ‘Cherry’ videos. We then flew back to Mexico the next day to do a show. Then back to Houston the day after that to finish shooting the two videos. Then we flew to Puerto Rico to perform the last show of the South American leg. You can imagine how organized all of this has to be to pull it off. Plus you’re learning lots of new choreography at the same time.”
“Then, finally—like a thief in the night without prior announcement or promotion, in the early morning of December 13, 2013—it came: a fourteen-track collection of all-new songs simply titled Beyoncé. Issued exclusively through the iTunes Store, the initial release of Beyoncé featured no physical copy. Stunning in its musical eccentricity and its bold, in-your-face sexuality, the music was accompanied by seventeen short films that illuminated the album’s lyrical content.”
“Immediately, two of the songs took off: “Blow,” produced by Pharrell Williams, and “Drunk in Love,” produced primarily by Timbaland. “XO,” produced primarily by Ryan Tedder, also garnered immediate acceptance. Many stations, though, just played the entire album, which is unheard of these days.”
“With no promotion or marketing platform, she’d put out an album available exclusively as a download in long form only that sold 1.3 million copies in seventeen days—seven days before physical copies were distributed to retailers. By the end of 2014, the album would go on to sell more than five million copies worldwide. Though none of the singles reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100—“Drunk in Love” peaked at number two on that chart—it didn’t matter at all; the album sold close to a million copies in the first week alone, the fastest-selling album in the history of iTunes.”
“As she stood in a conference room shortly after its phenomenal success and thanked the many members of her staff at Parkwood, only she, her family members, and her close friends recognized the true gravity of the accomplishment. After all, she’d done what she’d set out to do: She’d proved that she could hold her own without her father. It would never be the same without Mathew at the forefront of her career, and she had to accept as much. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t be worthwhile, though, and maybe even in some ways more rewarding. While the past was in the past, she now knew more than ever that the future held great promise.”
Using Tabloid Fodder as Marketing Material
“Once the elevator doors opened, out stepped Beyoncé, Jay, and Solange, looking as if nothing the least bit unusual had occurred—Beyoncé with a faint and mysterious smile, Solange looking tense and maybe even a little out of breath, both sashaying their way toward their vehicle as if on a runway while flashbulbs popped all around them. The only telltale sign of anything untoward having occurred was poor Jay rubbing the side of his face, as if he’d caught a nasty right hook.”
“Mathew said he believed the controversy had probably been staged. Implementing old-school PR tactics, he called it a “Jedi Mind Trick,” and suggested it had been a hoax concocted by the players not only to sell tickets for Beyoncé and Jay’s upcoming tour, but to increase sales of Solange’s recordings at a time when she was also starting her own record label, Saint Records. “Don’t think it’s just a coincidence that they were getting ready to go on tour and this happened,” he said. “I happen to know that ticket sales increased after that episode, as did sales for Solange’s album, which went up 200 percent. Oldest trick in the book.”
“During the previous year, 2014, Beyoncé had definitely been at the top of her game. She’d doubled her earnings, generating $115 million, up from the previous year’s $53 million. The increase was in large part thanks to two major tours, her Mrs. Carter and the couple’s joint On the Run. Also generating money were her ongoing endorsement deals, not to mention her successful perfume line—“Heat,” “Rise,” “Pulse” (and variations of each scent that have generated more than $400 million in the last three years). Of course, the successful launch of her surprise album and video package substantially added to her wealth”
“Today it’s difficult to believe that a time ever existed when Beyoncé went out of her way to not be seen or photographed with Jay, or did everything she could to make sure Blue Ivy’s face was not viewed by the public. These days she is known to post copious photos of family outings and vacations on social media. Rarely does a day go by when she doesn’t post some picture of either a major event in her family’s life or a simple moment of familial contentment. Of course, it could be said that the taking and posting of intimate family photos is just another marketing strategy—another version of herself put forth for public consumption, this time cast as a happy wife and mother. (Giving credence to this theory is the fact that she has often been accused of airbrushing the photos to glossy perfection.)”
“If there is a rumor about discord in her family, she immediately posts photographs that could be seen to contradict the story. This doesn’t necessarily mean the rumor is false as much as it suggests adept and continued protection of her image and that of her family. It’s a practice that resulted in her being named as one of Time’s “30 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2015.”