As she embarks on a small world tour, will Beyoncé finally reveal something of her real self?
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A decade ago, Beyoncé Knowles looked like she was on the verge of becoming Generation Y’s Diana Ross. Blessed with lustrous manes, secure families, a taste for flashy fashion and innately haughty bearings, each spent a decade of their youths in incredibly successful girl groups.
Both played music that borrowed from the underground but simplified and heightened the narrative dramas to seduce the mainstream – in Ross’s case with Motown, in Knowles’s gilding, gritty r&b with pop sheen. Both stood, too, at the centre of their girl gangs and were accused of enjoying preferential treatment from their Svengali managers, Berry Gordy and Matthew Knowles (Beyoncé’s father).
Ross’s early solo hits, including Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, created a high-water mark she spent the rest of her career trying to return to, just as Knowles’s debut album, which included the transcendent classic Crazy in Love, is still her bestselling.
No wonder, then, that when Knowles branched into film (in Dreamgirls, just as Ross had done in Lady Sings the Blues) it was to play a character who was Ross in all but name.
But as the younger diva is about to embark on her fourth solo tour, it is noticeable how much she tries to deviate from actually being a child of destiny. Whereas Ross was possessed of a doll-like frame within which raged the unbending ego of a giant, Knowles’s leonine physicality appears to disguise a less strident, more uncertain character.
From Mrs Carter to Sasha Fierce, from the respectable perfectionist afraid to let a bum note out at the US President’s inauguration to the potty-mouthed sensationalist behind the recent Bow Down, Knowles may be a force of nature on stage but underneath appears to be a work in progress.
Which is what makes her so compelling. There is no doubt her latest stage show will be as jaw-dropping as her Glastonbury turn two years ago, but who knows what facet of Knowles’s inner life will be hiding behind those sequins?
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A decade ago, Beyoncé Knowles looked like she was on the verge of becoming Generation Y’s Diana Ross. Blessed with lustrous manes, secure families, a taste for flashy fashion and innately haughty bearings, each spent a decade of their youths in incredibly successful girl groups.
Both played music that borrowed from the underground but simplified and heightened the narrative dramas to seduce the mainstream – in Ross’s case with Motown, in Knowles’s gilding, gritty r&b with pop sheen. Both stood, too, at the centre of their girl gangs and were accused of enjoying preferential treatment from their Svengali managers, Berry Gordy and Matthew Knowles (Beyoncé’s father).
Ross’s early solo hits, including Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, created a high-water mark she spent the rest of her career trying to return to, just as Knowles’s debut album, which included the transcendent classic Crazy in Love, is still her bestselling.
No wonder, then, that when Knowles branched into film (in Dreamgirls, just as Ross had done in Lady Sings the Blues) it was to play a character who was Ross in all but name.
But as the younger diva is about to embark on her fourth solo tour, it is noticeable how much she tries to deviate from actually being a child of destiny. Whereas Ross was possessed of a doll-like frame within which raged the unbending ego of a giant, Knowles’s leonine physicality appears to disguise a less strident, more uncertain character.
From Mrs Carter to Sasha Fierce, from the respectable perfectionist afraid to let a bum note out at the US President’s inauguration to the potty-mouthed sensationalist behind the recent Bow Down, Knowles may be a force of nature on stage but underneath appears to be a work in progress.
Which is what makes her so compelling. There is no doubt her latest stage show will be as jaw-dropping as her Glastonbury turn two years ago, but who knows what facet of Knowles’s inner life will be hiding behind those sequins?
Source