Ghetto Girl Wants To Be The New Beyonce
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Ghetto Girl Wants To Be The New Beyonce
Beyoncé's Real Life Is a Self-Centered Nightmare
This article is from the archive of our partner .
Life Is but a Dream is supposed to be the official version of Beyoncé's behind-the-scenes life, as she see it. And it is. Except for all the talk about the importance of family, we ultimately discover that Beyoncé is deeply self-centered. She is still a wonder on stage, but she has been so perfect for so long that, in glimpses of her off the stage, Beyoncé appears constantly out of touch with the real world. In rehearsal scenes, important members of her crew and her entourage go unmentioned by name in any notable way, and their work is often portrayed as at odds with her vision for the stage act. Of course a Beyoncé movie directed by Beyoncé to promote a Beyoncé tour would portray a magical Beyoncé vision as stemming from Beyoncé herself, but about halfway through this thing you find yourself asking: Doesn't anyone else get some credit? Is this a documentary or a some kind of autobiopic?
The media has not been altogether nice to Beyoncé in reviewing this HBO glamor project, which is being promoted as a "revealing" portrait "in her own words." Brian Lowery writes at Variety : "For those who can't imagine growing tired of Beyonce Knowles' flawless face (or the rest of her), try going 90 wearisome minutes with 'Life Is But a Dream' a vanity project that puts tolerance for showbiz self-obsession to the test." Nitsuh Abebe at New York explains : "the parts of Life Is But a Dream that show us a 'real' and 'vulnerable' Beyoncé feel like the parts of job interviews where someone’s asked about their greatest weaknesses." David Rooney at the Hollywood Reporter says: "actually the 90-minute film is repetitious and bland." Alessandra Stanley at the New York Times deems it "gauzy, stylish and utterly opaque." And over at Salon , Willa Paskin calls it "fascinating"—which it is—but also a "high-level propaganda piece." Which it most certainly is.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire .
Her new HBO documentary asks us to sympathize with her. But should we?
In Beyoncé's new documentary about Beyoncé co-directed by Beyoncé there's a shot of her flying in a helicopter checking her iPhone. As we see the real world below, the world of people who don't get to take those luxurious rides, Beyoncé says the following, in Beyoncé voiceover: "I think people have an idea in their heads about entertainers, celebrities. I think they feel like their lives are so perfect, and it's really hard to go through painful experiences when you're in the public eye, because it's hard to have closure." Beyoncé then cuts away to Beyoncé looking directly into the camera, describing her miscarriage, a traumatic experience for any woman, whether or not she's as trapped by celebrity as Beyoncé these days.
Beyoncé's self-styled soapbox in HBO's Life Is but a Dream (airing Saturday) is a coda of sorts to weeks worth of Beyoncé-mania, starting with the inauguration and reaching its peak with the Super Bowl. And now, in the denouement, we're told we'll see the real Beyoncé, the one for whom life is not so effortless. This Beyoncé goes through the same real-life struggles we do, but all under the watchful eye of the public. The media's interest in her life is clearly the enemy here, even though many of us worship her every move. We're supposed to sympathize with Beyoncé—except when she finally does open up, she presents us with a pristinely guarded queen who's actually more distant than ever.
Early on in Life Is but a Dream , Beyoncé says, in voiceover: "Thank God for my computer." The real, behind-the-scenes Beyoncé, we are led to believe, is constantly recording selfie videos on her laptop, in which she reveals her innermost feelings in a perfectly poised fashion. You can see some of this in HBO's teaser:
Beyoncé has never been one to be unfiltered. Just take her Tumblr: a marvelously put-together collection of professional photos and personal photos that look professional. In the documentary, though, Beyoncé implies that we are witnessing her important, rare moments of alone time. Amy Wallace's recent GQ profile explained that there exists a "Beyoncé archive," which contains "virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny's Child, the '90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she's ever done; every video of every show she's ever performed; every diary entry she's ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop." The "unblinking eye" of her laptop, as it appears in Life Is but a Dream , never catches any blemishes, nor snot, nor bed hed.
The world got another taste of this self-love last week when her publicist asked BuzzFeed to take down photos of her Super Bowl performance . The outtakes from a Getty photographer were in this post about how "fierce" Beyoncé's halftime show looked, and the photos showed her body contracting and straining in ways that are, you know, pretty normal when a normal person is dancing vigorously. Last we heard, fierceness was not a bad thing—Beyoncé was, after all, Sasha Fierce. But bad photos of Beyoncé? That simply is not done in Beyoncé's world—even Getty had to delete the shots from its archive. And if other scenes in this documentary are any indication, Beyoncé has quite possibly never seen a single unflattering image of herself in any medium. She looks stunning when recording close-ups of herself in bad lighting. She looks stunning when she's going into labor. Watching her perform flawlessly is a thrill. Watching her go through hard times without a hair out of place just makes you feel bad about yourself.
Beyoncé's message: being in the spotlight can be difficult. Well, of course it can. And in Life Is but a Dream , she's clearly feeling real, human emotion when she describes hearing the rumor that she has faked her pregnancy. And that was a particularly nasty rumor. But the media, for the most part, reveres Beyoncé. That's why perhaps everyone was so angry about the lip-syncing scandal following her performance of the national anthem on Inauguration Day. We know she's talented, so why couldn't she live up to the expectations of perfection that we expect?
As much as we actually do want Beyoncé to like us—she is the closest thing we have to royalty over here, and her talent and beauty is remarkable—nobody is really sure Beyoncé wants to like us in return. We're the people who don't understand what it's really like for her, she tells us. And after this big "revealing" documentary, we still don't know what her real life is really like. Even though she swears she's just like everyone else, it doesn't seem like it. Maybe we'll get more in the Oprah interview that also airs on Saturday night. But probably not. Beyoncé herself—not just Beyoncé's dream life—prohibits us from feeling bad for her.
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From the moment Beyoncé lands in London, she’s treated like a princess. A British Airways agent meets her at the door of the plane and whisks her and her four-person crew down an almost hidden set of stairs and into a waiting British Airways car. Other passengers making connections at Heathrow Airport have to slog between terminals on a bus, but the twenty-two-year-old Houston native, who says she’s really a New Yorker now, zips through the airport’s back roads, trying to figure out whether her final destination – Cannes – is pronounced can or con . She wears no necklace and no rings, but she’s still dressed very girly, in big, chunky earrings, a pink off-the-shoulder cashmere sweater with a sort of bow in the front, a brown fur-lined wrap, fuzzy pink boots, jeans and a hot-pink baseball hat with embroidered sparkles on the front forming a cat and more sparkles on the back spelling out BEYONCÉ. Her shoulders and neck flow gracefully out from under her sweater, recalling old French sculptures that romanticized the curves of the female form. She has golden skin, three small birthmarks on her face, perfect teeth and a dancer’s posture that makes her seem much taller than five feet seven. And her tight jeans reveal her to be a healthy girl, someone the brothers would call thick, with a booming system in the back.
The last six months have seen a sort of Beyoncé explosion, where she went from the most popular singer in a hot group, Destiny’s Child, to a ubiquitous solo megastar whose Dangerously in Love has been bought by more than 2 million people, earned her six Grammy nominations and spawned two of the hottest songs of last year, “Crazy in Love” and “Baby Boy.” Beyoncé has become a crossover sex symbol a la Halle Berry, a black girl who’s not so overwhelmingly Nubian that white people don’t appreciate her beauty. She’s what Janet Jackson used to be: the tasteful sex symbol who’s giving you R&B-flavored pop hits and state-of-the-art videos, tours and movies, too. This year will see still more Beyoncé: In March, she starts a five-week tour with Alicia Keys and Missy Elliott, then she plans to record a new Destiny’s Child album and finish the year with a Destiny’s Child tour. But offstage, the girl is careful to maintain a distance between the person who’s famous and the person shaped long before fame. “I don’t want to get addicted to fame,” she says. “Then when I’m no longer famous I won’t know what to do, and I’ll just seem desperate and lose my mind.” She has been training to be famous since age ten, when her father would make her run one mile in the morning while singing, to build up the ability to sing and dance at the same time. The first Destiny’s Child album came out when she was sixteen, in 1998, a year before Britney Spears and the teen-pop supernova (she and Spears are the same age); Beyoncé has worked relentlessly since. “You lose touch with who you are,” she says. “When you work so much like we did, it’s just too much.”
“I don’t want to get addicted to fame. Then when I’m no longer famous I won’t know what to do, and I’ll just seem desperate and lose my mind.”
When she lands in Nice, France, she’s met by an agent who takes her to a special, empty line at passport control. But nowadays even princesses sometimes hit potholes. While she’s at the baggage carousel, tired, hungry and running on empty after a long trip from Newark, New Jersey, to the south of France, someone from British Airways runs up and says two bags are missing. Beyoncé mumbles that the missing bags are surely hers. She’s annoyed. Anyone would be. But she says not one more word. “You wanna think she’s a bitch because she’s so fine,” says her choreographer, Frank Gatson Jr. “But I’ve never seen someone so sweet. It trips me out. Knowing she wants to go off on somebody because somebody’s pissed her off, she catches herself. She knows that humility is important. I think it’s her upbringing in church.” At the airport, she just rolls her eyes and grins. It’s a fake smile, but it’s polite, professional. She lives like a princess but doesn’t have airs.
E very princess must have a prince, and Beyoncé’s is the recently retired MC Jay-Z , who’s more than a decade older. “I know the dude a long time,” an insider says of Jay-Z . “I’ve never seen him sprung like this. He cares about her, gives her great advice, he wants his woman to look right. They adore each other.” Jay and Beyoncé both refuse to discuss the relationship. “I don’t say I’m single,” she responds. “People are like, ‘Why does she say that they’re just friends?’ I don’t say that. I just don’t talk about it. I just wanna protect my private life.”
“In relationships, I think a lot like a guy. If I do something wrong, I don’t get emotional. I think about it, and I change it and fix it. I’ve always been very logical.”
She does, though, talk about what sort of girlfriend she is. “In relationships, I think a lot like a guy,” she says. “If I do something wrong, I don’t get emotional. I think about it, and I change it and fix it. I’ve always been very logical.” Still, she can find herself overcome by emotion sometimes: “When I do anything, I do it. If I fall in love, I’m there.” She says she’d like to have children one day. “If it was a perfect world, I would have two boys and a girl,” she says. “I love little boys, and girls are so much drama.”
And she does talk about Jay, though not by name. She’s very free with “we.” Asked where she was during the blackout of 2003, she replies, “We were at the 40/40 Club,” the Manhattan sports bar Jay-Z opened last year. There was a generator at the club, so the party never stopped. “At 4 A.M. we took a plane to Italy,” she says. “We got to Rome, and they had a blackout there.”
Beyoncé and Jay’s movements around the globe are well documented by the paparazzi. A recent photo from their New Year’s vacation in St. Barths shows Beyoncé jumping into the water off the bridge of a three-story, 14-foot yacht while Jay captures the moment with a video camera. It was a long way down. “Yeah, it was,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I looked at the picture and said, ‘That’s really dumb.’ I do it every year. That’s my jump. It’s a ritual. That’s my ‘let go, start over, this is a vacation and I’m-a be free.’ I have to jump off something so I can let go of everything that happened before the last vacation and start over. It’s like bein’ baptized.”
B efore Beyoncé was baptized, her father, Mathew Knowles, was an executive in medical sales at Xerox, selling multimillion-dollar pieces of equipment and making six figures. “I was blessed to be the number-one sales rep in the medical division of Xerox for years,” he says. Mathew is Beyoncé’s manager, the one who negotiated everything from her initial record deals with Elektra and Columbia to her recent endorsement deals with L’Oréal and Tommy Hilfiger, and who executive-produced all of her albums. He’s pleasant, though self-serious, with an easy laugh. There’s nothing like massive public success to make a man feel good about himself. You talk about laughing all the way to the bank; Knowles laughs like a man who just got back from the bank.
His wife, Tina Knowles, has light skin, long, wavy hair with blond streaks, and green eyes. Mathew says, “Beyoncé’s not as beautiful as her mama.” Whereas Beyoncé is underaccessorized, Tina visited Beyoncé in New York wearing a giant diamond ring on each hand, a diamond tennis bracelet and a diamond watch on her left wrist and what looked like another diamond watch on her right wrist. She owns one of the top beauty salons in Houston, called Head-Liners, where Beyoncé says she grew up. “She got a lot of influence from my clients,” Tina says. “We catered to the professional woman, so we had judges and attorneys, and I really credit that to her having that drive and ambition. She had a lot of great women around her who inspired her to work hard and do great things.”
The Knowles family lived in a large house in Houston with all the accouterments of the upper-middle class. Beyoncé grew up perhaps more well-off than any other current black superstar. “We lived in a house the same size as we do now and in a neighborhood as nice as I do now,” she says. In 1981, while Tina Knowles was pregnant with her first child, she realized that her family name, Beyince, was dying. Tina is the youngest of seven, but only one of her brothers had had a son. “I said, ‘Oh, God, we’ll run out of Beyinces,'” Tina says. So she gave her daughter a variant of her maiden name. Grandpa Lumis Beyince, a Creole who lived in New Orleans and spoke French, was unimpressed. “My family was not happy,” Tina says. “My dad said, ‘She’s gonna be really mad at you, because that’s a last name.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not
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