KEY POINTS:
Be it on television, in the pages of magazines, or in the little rectangle of a YouTube screen, we tend to see the famous in two dimensions.
The rarest and most prized performers are those who are able to escape the restrictions of that single flattening plane. Call it presence, dynamism, star power, it is a strange and fleeting quality - and those who possess it can name their price. This may be one reason why Forbes magazine announced last month that the highest-paid pop musician in the world this year, with earnings of US$80 million ($145 million), is singer Beyonce Knowles.
Before I travelled to New York to meet the 27-year-old Texan, I had seen her perform just one song. But if you had to choose a single Beyonce number to witness live, her 2003 breakthrough hit, Crazy in Love, would surely be it.
The occasion was the 2004 Brit Awards, held in February at the Earls Court arena in west London. Beyonce put in an unforgettable performance. As part of her act, two huge Cadillacs were tipped over, fire spurted into the air, and a trillion slivers of silver glitter fell from the sky. But it was the magnificent figure of Beyonce herself that stayed in the mind, advancing down a white staircase in skyscraper heels, hair blasted vertical by hidden fans, not so much singing a song as detonating a great bomb of glamour, passion and joie de vivre in the middle of the whole lacklustre affair. On screen her ability to project is exceptional; witnessed in 3D that night it left the thousands of fans crackling with pleasure.
In the intervening years, the significance of Crazy in Love, one of the most widely recognised pop songs of this decade, has become increasingly apparent. For it was no mere performance or interpretation: crazy in love she was indeed - with Shawn Carter, aka Jay-Z, the New York rapper whom she had met in the summer of 2002 when she sang Bonnie to his Clyde on his hit single '03 Bonnie & Clyde. And who, with earnings of US$83 million this year, was number two in Forbes' top 10 highest earners in hip-hop (a musical form now so dominant in America and around the world that it requires a category all of its own).
Furthermore, after a five-year courtship, in a secret ceremony conducted in his New York penthouse on April 4 this year, he married Beyonce Knowles. It was at a photographic studio in the Chelsea Piers complex, where Manhattan meets the Hudson river to the west, that I first met the new Mrs Carter.
After listening to her forthcoming album, I Am Sasha Fierce, I had been invited for a brief introduction before our interview. Next to the lightly baked asparagus tips on the catering table was displayed a vast array of Bulgari diamond jewellery.
A small man tended to the tips; a considerably larger one to the bling. Because Beyonce insisted on a closed set, I couldn't watch the shoot that was being conducted on the other side of a high, canvas screen. So I watched her mother instead, as she made curt mobile phone calls a propos of her daughter. Stocky and broad-shouldered, with straight black hair and a faint bow to her legs, Tina Knowles is Beyonce's stylist and confidante, a key figure in her life. Everything about her said "don't even think about talking to me, mister". Then came a rustle and a little signal in my direction. If one thing could be said to sum up Beyonce in the public imagination it is her physical confidence, the sense of control and fierce pride that gives her singing and dancing such magnetism. I stood, half expecting her to bound out in Bulgari hotpants, performing her trademark booty-shaking dance. But from behind the screen emerged a very different figure: tall, slim, straight-backed, hair tied up, dressed in a formal gown. She walked very directly towards me with her hand outstretched and a firm "pleased to meet you".
The handshake was warm, accomplished and smooth - seven out of 10 on the squeezometer. Then she went back to work. The whole encounter felt rather like meeting Condoleezza Rice. For she may have a hip-hop husband, but Beyonce is no poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Hers is not the typical biography of the modern R&B singer, a Mary J. Blige tale of struggling to escape from deprivation. Her parents were successful businesspeople. Her father, Mathew Knowles, sold medical equipment; her mother owned and ran a hair and beauty salon near the family home in Houston, Texas. Her maternal grand-parents were French-speaking Creoles from Louisiana called Beyince, and it was to keep that side of her background alive that her mother gave her the name that has stood her in such good stead, the single-word appellation that has become for this generation what Madonna was to the previous one: the bizarre, but instantly memorable, Beyonce.
Privately educated, Beyonce won her first talent show in 1988 at the age of 7, and by 8 had met the first of the girls with whom, under the guidance of her father, she was to form the group Destiny's Child. By the time she was 13, her father had given up his job to devote himself full-time to coaching the group and securing them a record deal. Beyonce's mother designed and made the girls' costumes; rehearsals were held at the salon.
Eventually in 1996, with Beyonce then 15, the group was offered a contract, but it came at a cost: under the strain of their halved income and the intense concentration on their daughter's success, the couple split up, with Beyonce and her only sibling, younger sister Solange, moving into a small apartment with their mother.
For the Knowles family it was a difficult time. Destiny's Child, however, was on its way to becoming the biggest-selling girl group of all time. When I sit down to talk to her on the day after the photo shoot, it is this period of her life that Beyonce refers to first.
Sitting barefoot on the hotel room sofa, today she is resolutely casual, in jeans and a plaid shirt. The only signs of her stellar status are a slender rope of diamonds at her neck and a super-high-production-value pedicure that makes each of her toes look as if its nail is made of highly polished chrome. She has a film role to talk about, too but we start with her new release, her third solo album, which is that trickiest of creative endeavours and the downfall of many a musician - a double album.
"I usually record my albums very quickly," she says. "Apart from the first Destiny's Child album, which took two years. But then we were so young when they signed us. They didn't know what to do with us and we didn't know what to sing about, so it took us some time. But after that the next album took two months to make, the next one three months and then two months."
Although Destiny's Child eventually disbanded in 2005, with various ex-members filing lawsuits against Mathew Knowles for breach of contract, the group's furious work rate brought the group multimillion sales and a string of hits and Grammy awards. It is an approach that has come to define Beyonce's prolific career.
"I worked so hard on my previous album, B'day. My last tour was 136 shows. For this one I wanted to take my time. I ended up recording 70 songs. And I was so attached to the songs - you put your heart into it. And I realised I had made two albums. It's a lot of music," she laughs.
There is no doubt that Beyonce's intense striving to make the best of herself is one of the things that has made her popular. "I don't play any instrument," she says. "I have writers that I write with, or I have writers that will send me a full song, and I'll rearrange it - change the second verse, change the melody, keep a chord that I like, and recreate it. Just depends. I might bring in whoever I think can help the song. When I have just a beat it's the most fun for me. I'll get somebody to play whatever I hum for the bassline. So I'm creating a whole track with my voice."
The problem of what to write about, which slowed down the nascent Destiny's Child, has long been solved. Beyonce songs are hymns to female self-empowerment, celebrations of womanly strength in a world where men are, on the whole, out to do a girl wrong. I ask her why she thinks almost every woman I told that I was going to meet her expressed such a tangible sense of goodwill towards her. "Well, that's something I'm very happy about and very grateful for. I write a lot of my songs for women. A lot of the songs are about things that we need to hear. Things I wouldn't really say, or I wish I could say. I'm kind of a voice for a lot of young women. I feel that women understand men a little better. I really don't feel that men understand women as much. And it's something that we go through all the time. But I also feel like we learn a lot from each other, and when we're connected it's amazing."
Yet Beyonce readily admits that much of the life experience she draws on for her songs is not first-hand. The child-star upbringing did not permit her much time to waste on boyfriends. "People would be surprised as to the lack of experiences I've had," she says. "When I was 12, 13 I had my first boyfriend, and he was my boyfriend until I was 17. At that age, that was a long time. I've always been very loyal and a little more mature. Though I was too young for it to really be a boyfriend - we didn't live together, we didn't, you know... That was my only experience with a guy, and since then I've only had one other boyfriend in my life - Jay. I wrote my lyrics from growing up in my mother's hair salon and hearing stories from women there. Women would come in and they'd talk about what was going on in their lives. I would hear about this woman who was shy, and this woman who liked men with money, and this one's into football players, and this woman's been married 20 years and her husband's doing this and that. Those were the stories I heard."
It must be frustrating, I suggest, to have success, money, fame, respect - so many of the things that we are taught will make us happy - and yet be cut off from so much of life. All those great cities viewed only through the airtight windows of fashionable hotels - hasn't she ever wanted to, say, go and live in Paris for six months?
"That's funny because that's exactly one of the things I'd love to do. I do feel trapped sometimes, but not as much as I did when I was 18, 19, 20. Those years were difficult because that's when you're becoming a woman. And I was everywhere but I didn't have a life. My life was work. I didn't really even go to a prom. Well, I went to my boyfriend's prom, as his date. But I didn't know anyone there, and I had to be home early because I was only 16. I didn't go to ballgames and do those things. I was always really quiet and shy but I felt at home on stage. I felt I could step out of myself. I'm a very private person and I am not the type of personality that enjoys being looked at all the time. At a party I'm the one hanging back, observing other people. But on stage I felt at home."
It may seem hard to square this image of the nice girl who comes home early from the prom with the vampish figure - all oiled thighs and knee-boots - who cavorts around in her videos. But even in her most provocative moments Beyonce exudes a certain wholesomeness - not so much ghetto fabulous as private-school fabulous.
Indeed, she has gone as far as to give a name to the persona that she adopts when she is performing: Sasha Fierce. "That is my alter ego and now she has a last name,"'she says. "I have someone else that takes over when it's time for me to work and when I'm on stage, this alter ego that I've created that kind of protects me and who I really am."
Disc two of the new album is the Sasha Fierce side. It is an up-tempo collection of club cuts, full of grunts, moans and exhortations for unspecified individuals to shoot homemade adult content of her on their video phones. This part of the album is what one might expect given her previous work, but it is the surprising disc one that shows Beyonce's steely ambition at work again. Among the biggest-selling songs in the world this decade is You're Beautiful by the English crooner James Blunt.
Since its release in 2005 it has sold millions because it combines a catchy melodic line with lyrics that capture a universal sentiment. Modern club/R&B songs, such as the ones that have made Beyonce a star, are rhythmically driven and tend not to have either of those enduring qualities. You're Beautiful was written by Londoner Amanda Ghost, and her writing credit can also be found under three tracks on Beyonce's new album.
Ghost says she was amazed to be contacted by her. "She approached me through her husband, Jay, because we had been introduced and were talking about working together. He arranged a meeting and she said would I write a song for her. And I said I don't know anything about urban music. But she likes so many different styles, as does Jay-Z. The reason they wanted me was because I wasn't from that world. And we started a friendship. We spent three weeks together in New York working on the new record and we had the most incredible time. She has a complete, almost laser-like focus on what she is and what she can do."
Beyonce's new film role also sees her pushing herself forward into new territory. Well received as Foxxy Cleopatra in Austin Powers (2002) and Deena Jones in Dreamgirls (2006), in her latest movie, Cadillac Records, she plays the troubled 1960s soul singer Etta James. The work of the female director Darnell Martin, the film also features Basquiat star Jeffrey Wright, Adrien Brody from The Pianist and the rapper Mos Def.
The role is certainly a departure for Beyonce - Etta James was as renowned for her long addiction to heroin as her heart-wrenching recordings of songs such as I Would Rather Go Blind. "I wanted to do something darker," Beyonce says of the part, "but when I got the script I thought, 'wow - this is heavy. Can I do this?'
In the first scene she meets her father for the first time and he rejects her. And there's a lot of profanity - she was like the opposite of me. People think of me as the sweetheart, and she's like the anti-sweetheart. She was rebellious, she was politically incorrect, she was bold, she was unapologetic, she was so brave, and she just didn't care." I wonder if beneath the control, the focus and the drive there is a part of Beyonce that would like not to care:
"Yes, absolutely. I mean I can't help but to care - that's just who I am. And it's not about pleasing everybody, because I know that's impossible, but it's just that I have so much respect for my job. I've worked so hard, worked my whole childhood at it. So I just cherish it. Whenever I decide to do something, I try to do it all the way. That's a part of my personality. I don't know how to do things in between. Either I love somebody and I stick with them, or I have nothing to say to them and I don't deal with them. I'm all or nothing."
With the matter of love raised, a silence descends and the figure of Jay-Z seems to hover over the room. Beyonce has guarded details of their relationship and, in particular, their wedding day with the same measured ferocity that she appears to bring to all aspects of her life. I ask her about his performance at this year's Glastonbury Festival, at which he was, amid some controversy, the first rap artist ever to top the bill. I was in the crowd, I tell her, and it was one of the performances of the year - of any year. She visibly glows.
"I was so proud of him that night. To come into that atmosphere and that incredible place and do what he did. I've seen those pictures of Kate Moss in her boots and all that mud! I was dancing like crazy, dancing crazy hip-hop moves offstage. I don't know if I've ever seen him do a better show. He rocked that crowd, showed them what he's about. Jay is, well he's the number one. But there was something going on that night - something more than just music."
There is no question that this is true. That Jay-Z show was one of those moments when music is the conduit for much more than just good times or sentiment. It felt not like an arts event but a news event. There was a strong - and faintly racist - feeling in some quarters that a hip-hop star should not be headlining the world's greatest rock festival.
Jay-Z walked into this hostile situation with a dignity and humour uncannily reminiscent of Barack Obama - for whom he did a succession of benefit shows during the US election - and gave a performance of extraordinary maturity and poise. It seemed to mark a shift, however tiny, in the perception of black culture in the world. But had she not been tempted to help him out, I wonder.
A chorus or two of Crazy in Love? "Oh, no. There was never any question of that," she says with a flicker of the eyebrow that suggests the subject is now closed. When I told Amanda Ghost that Beyonce professed to have had little life experience, she laughed. "I think she's selling herself a bit short there. I think she's had huge experiences - but they've been bizarre ones that you or I couldn't imagine. The challenge of being a songwriter is to take your life experience and make it universal, so that everybody else relates. She keeps the Jay-Z references ambiguous, but music is the one place she can be incredibly expressive - look at the lyrics to the track Ave Maria.
We were talking about how much we loved the Schubert Ave Maria. We had both recently got married, and it turned out we had both come up the aisle to that song. So I said wouldn't it be great to try and rewrite it. And the lyric is very much about her. She talks about being surrounded by friends but she's alone - "how can the silence seem so loud?" and then "there's only us when the lights go down". I think that's probably the most personal line on the whole album about her and Jay, because they are very real, and they're very much in love, and it must be pretty tough to have that love when you're incredibly famous."
I rather admired Beyonce for her refusal to let her relationship become public property. She seemed very grounded, seemed to have a firm grasp of what mattered in life. "It can be hard not to lose the plot, you know," she says. "You have to imagine waking up and going to a shoot. And every designer wants you to wear their clothes. And it's all these $200,000 dresses and all these diamonds. And they retouch you to make you look perfect, and you start to believe that you really look like that," she laughs. "And you can be rude to people and no one says anything because they want their jobs. You can very easily lose perspective."
For a swift lesson in real life she need look no further than her ever-present mother, who is still involved in every costume change, every photo shoot. "There have been times where my mum has literally smacked me in my face. When I was 19 - when I was confused and wondering 'what am I doing, who am I?'
- we were in the record store, my mum and dad were both there, and my song was playing, and I was feeling like hot stuff. She was asking me something and I started singing while she was talking to me. And there were some really cute guys in the store who were noticing me, and I was like, 'Oh, yeah! I'm hot!' And my mum said, 'I'm talking to you'. And I kept singing. And so she smacked me - slapped me in my face, so hard. I didn't get spankings growing up. They didn't believe in that. My mum said, 'She thinks she's hot stuff because her single is out. Nobody cares about that! You are still my child. I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it! Now go sit in the car'.
But it was the best thing she could have ever done to me because for the first time I realised I was losing sight of what was important. "I admire my mother so much. Both [she] and my father worked so hard. Weekdays they worked 12, 13 hours. On weekends we saw each other and Sundays we would go to church and go eat together, but they were exhausted. Now I'm older I don't know how they did it. But my work ethic comes from watching them. My mother was a strong woman and she always told me, you do for yourself. That's one of the reasons I have songs about independence and women that work hard. I saw my mother and father separate. We moved from this bigger house to an apartment, but we still had great Christmases. It had to be really difficult for her. But I saw that and I respect that, and I think women are so strong."
And what about becoming a mother herself? There is something compelling about her marriage - the bringing together of Jay-Z, the former drug dealer and hustler from Bedford-Stuyvesant in the wrong part of Brooklyn, and God-fearing, clean-living, self-improving Beyonce from the posh school in the nice, air-conditioned part of Texas.
Together they have carved out a new blueprint for black entertainers, making the key leap from being mere employees to being autonomous businesspeople. But as Jay-Z's great rival, 50 Cent, rather cruelly put it, "he wouldn't be nothing without Beyonce".
Around their relationship is the sense that strong, powerful, talented as he is, it is the love of an exceptional woman that has elevated Jay-Z to greatness. So does she plan to start the Carter-Knowles dynasty any time soon? "One day," she says. "I'm really patient. I wasn't in a rush to get married. I'm not in a rush to have children. Because I work so much, I'm just not ready yet.
I have a nephew, my sister's son - it's his birthday today and after this interview I'm going to Houston to see him. I was there in the delivery room when he was born. I had begged my sister, please don't make me, it's going to traumatise me. But she talked me into it - and I was right! I'm scared of that! I mean it was amazing, and I cried when he was born. And I can't believe that we, as humans, have the power to create another human being. But it's hard. It's a lot of work and you have to be ready to be responsible for another human being. And I guess I want to be so good at it. I want to make sure that I'm ready so I can give my focus to my kid. When it happens it's supposed to happen. You know, I over-analyse everything, and I want to be the best at it, and maybe that's just me being an over-achiever. I just wish I was better at everything."
* Beyonce's album I Am Sasha Fierce is out now. Cadillac Records is out early next year.
