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 type of control over what she was doing in the studio.”
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.
“But for the most part, it was just me, Beyoncé, and Kelly in the studio for ‘Bootylicious,’ a sort of crucible moment for us. I’ll be forever grateful for the memory,” he recalled. “Beyoncé included me in the process in so many ways: ‘Is it too much?’ ‘Is the syncopation too complex?’ ‘Is it too weird?’ ‘Is it too outside the box?’ So I admit I have ownership of my feelings about that session. I am fairly certain she did that for all of the producers and engineers she worked with. 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.
“Engineers often say they knew a record was a hit the moment they first heard it,” Dan Workman concluded. “I’ve had that feeling before, but never as strong as that day. I drove home from the studio in my raggedy Toyota pickup truck thinking, ‘You know what? This “Bootylicious” thing is going to turn out to be one of the biggest songs I’ve ever worked on.’ I was right. Later, when I heard it on the radio, I was knocked out by it.”
Before “Bootylicous” was released, there was some disagreement between 8Bit and Mathew about the distinctive Stevie Nicks sample (meaning a small but recognizable piece of music) that has since helped popularize the song. “I told him, ‘Mathew, we need to take that sample out of there,’ ” said 8Bit. “ ‘Give me a guitar and let me just redo it with a different twist, and I’m telling you, I’ll have it feeling just the same if not better.’ ”
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. He was always planning to eventually replace it with his own guitar work. “I’d learned after sampling Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Wish’ for Will Smith’s ‘Wild Wild West’ that I didn’t want to lose 50 percent of the publishing for a very small sample,” he explained. “Mathew wasn’t having it, though. He felt strongly—and he was right, incidentally—that the Nicks sample was so unique and so identifiable, it would bring instant recognition to the song. Besides that, Beyoncé was completely wedded to it. There was no way she would agree to replacing it. So,” he concluded, chuckling, “about 50 percent [of the publishing] got cut for that simple, repetitive, one-note Stevie Nicks sample.”
When released on May 20, 2001, “Bootylicious”—the second single from Destiny Child’s third album, Survivor—would go straight to number one on the Billboard Top 200. It would remain on the charts for twenty-eight weeks. The word “bootylicious” would become so popular, in fact, that it would be added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006: “(Of a woman) sexually attractive.” (It should be noted, though, that the word was one that rapper Snoop Dogg first used in the 1993 Dr. Dre song “Fuck Wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’).” However, Snoop used the word to denote something as being weak not powerful, which is entirely different from Beyoncé’s intent.)
There was even more controversy, though, after the song was released. 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.
“Mathew, my phone is ringing off the hook,” 8Bit said, “with people telling me they saw Beyoncé on TV last night saying how she got the idea for ‘Bootylicious.’ Now they think I’ve been bullshitting them this whole time I’ve been saying I was totally involved. I look like an idiot!”
“So, what’s your point?” Mathew asked.
“Well, 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.”
Survivor
Dan Workman couldn’t help it; he didn’t want to be a pest, but he was just always so fascinated by Beyoncé’s process. “And where does this come from?” he asked her a few days after “Bootylicious” was recorded. At the time, she was in the studio putting the finishing touches on “Independent Women,” whose message was that no man was needed to take care of her; she could do it herself: “If I wanted the watch you’re wearing / I’ll buy it / The house I live in / I bought it / The car I’m driving / I bought it / I depend on me.”
“You’re so young,” Dan observed. “I’m just wondering . . .”
Beyoncé smiled bashfully. “Well, I have had at least some life experiences, Dan,” she demurred. “The way I want to live, I don’t want to ever be dependent on no man for anything. The women I have seen in my life have all been empowered,
” she explained. “I think that’s a good message to pass on to young girls.”
“It is,” he agreed. “It’s just that you’re, what, twenty?” He said he found it astonishing that she would have this point of view already.
“I’ve been this way since I was a kid,” she said. “That’s just who I am, who my mom is. Solange and Kelly are the same way. Y’all men don’t have to do anything for us. We’ll do it ourselves.”
There was more to it, of course. Certainly watching her mother navigate her difficult marriage while maintaining her sense of independence had to have influenced Beyoncé’s thinking. In recent years, Tina had chosen to stay in the marriage for her own reasons, but financial security was no longer one of them. If she chose to leave, she could do so and still be wealthy. It was her decision not to abandon the marriage, and in that choice she found a certain power of her own, the kind that no doubt influenced her daughter’s songwriting. That said, if one listens closely to “Independent Women,” it’s a statement of anger as much as it is of independence. The message in Beyoncé’s lyrics is a complete rejection of victimization as much as it is a declaration of independence from it.
“What is it you really want to do with these lyrics?” Dan asked at the end of their conversation about “Independent Women.” He already knew the answer, he just wanted to hear her say it.
“One word,” she said with a smile. “Inspire.”
With Destiny Child’s third album, Survivor (most of which was recorded in the spring of 2000), not only would the group come into its own, but Beyoncé would clearly define who she now was as a performer and where she was headed as an artist. She would cowrite and coproduce almost every song. Unlike with previous albums, where all members of DC contributed lyrics, on Survivor Kelly and Michelle had only one writing credit, “Outro (DC-3) Thank You,” at the album’s climax, which amounted to little more than a recorded shout-out. The rest of the tracks were collaborations between Beyoncé and a production team that included D’Wayne Wiggins, Falonte Moore, Damon Elliott, Anthony Dent, Mark J. Feist, and Bill Lee, among others.
The only song on which Beyoncé is not credited as a writer is the group’s cover of the Samantha Sang hit “Emotion,” which was written by Barry and Robin Gibb. However, Beyoncé is credited as the song’s producer, with Mark J. Feist and Mathew Knowles.
As executive producer of the album, Mathew had the huge responsibility of keeping a tight rein on song selection. He endeavored to make sure the album featured the best of the best. Or as Taura Stinson put it, “It started getting to the point where getting a song on an album of Beyoncé’s was like winning the lottery.”
“By this time, Mathew had started striking a real hard bargain,” 8Bit recalled. “It was like, either you go his way and agree to his terms, or he was just going to pull your songs from the album. He told me he’d pulled some Rodney Jerkins tracks, he pulled a Timbaland track, and I think he even pulled a song written by his own nephew, all because those guys wouldn’t agree to his terms relating to royalties and publishing. I was, like, ‘Who is this guy?’ But, hey, this was his daughter, and he was going to do what was best for her. And that’s why I’m proud to say I have three really good songs on the album.” (As Rob Fusari, he is credited with having cowritten and coproduced “Bootylicious,” “Apple Pie à la Mode,” and “Happy Face.”)
When one considers the dustup Mathew caused when he began to single Beyoncé out from the other girls with whom she sang—going all the way back to Ashley Davis’s departure from Girls Tyme—an excellent album like this one that was primarily crafted by his daughter was nothing if not sweet vindication. “The album is all Beyoncé inside and out,” Mathew would later proudly admit. “It’s not only the culmination of her vision of herself, it’s the culmination of what I always saw for her, from the very beginning.”
What’s also fascinating about the Survivor album is that as much as it’s a Beyoncé album in terms of writing and producing, it also reflects her democracy when it comes to her group members; it’s the first album that features all of the girls singing lead on every song. That had always been Beyoncé’s vision of the group anyway, and now it had finally come to pass. In a sense, she and Mathew both had their ways with this album—she was the greatest creative influence, but all three girls got to sing.
“When we did the ‘Gospel Medley’ on Survivor, it was cut live,” recalled Dan Workman. “We literally had the three ladies set up in the studio behind a mike, and that’s very difficult to do from a technical recording standpoint. Ordinarily, you’d record each girl individually and then mix the three vocal tracks together to make one sound. I honestly didn’t know if Michelle was going to be able to hang with Kelly and Beyoncé. But she did, and it was effortless. ‘She’s the real deal,’ I told Beyoncé. ‘She’s not just someone filling a spot.’ Granted, they didn’t use her a lot on the album. They’d drop her in for a few lines here and there, like icing on a cake. It was always good, and just enough to make you say, ‘Okay. I get it. Very nice!’ ”
Beyoncé would say that she had radio criticism to thank for the inspiration behind the album’s title track. While she was on tour with Christina Aguilera, she heard a drive-time disc jockey make a crack about Destiny’s Child, comparing the group to the popular television show Survivor. He was wondering which girl would soon “get voted off the island.” Beyoncé was annoyed. She wrote “Survivor” the following night on the plane to the next city. “I wrote it quickly because I was frustrated,” she later recalled. “For me, it was all about what survival means for women, and how hard it is to be one when there are people out there who are trying to bring you down.” (Anthony Dent actually wrote the music, and Beyoncé wrote the lyrics, the melody, and the vocal arrangement.)
In “Survivor,” the chanting of “what!” in the chorus was actually Mathew’s contribution to the song; thus he is credited as a cowriter. He said he just walked into the session while the girls were recording the song, had the idea, suggested it, and it worked. He explained that he’d wanted the chanting to suggest audience participation. While this may sound like an inconsequential contribution, in fact it propels the song forward.
With staggering first-week sales of almost seven hundred thousand copies—the highest first-week sales figures of any album in Columbia/Sony Records history—Survivor entered the Billboard albums chart at number one on May 19, 2001. It would be certified quadruple platinum in sales, and earn Destiny’s Child three more Grammy nominations. It would go on to win a 2002 Grammy for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. It would also be a huge international success. By the end of 2001, it had sold almost ten million copies worldwide
“The Survivor album was the product of some of my favorite recording sessions with the girls,” concluded Dan Workman of SugarHill Recording Studios. Workman recalled a day when Beyoncé had just finished a photo shoot and walked into the studio in full makeup with a wild tangle of hair extensions, looking for all the world like one of the world’s great divas. The first thing she said when she showed up was, ‘’Scuse me, y’all, I need to go wash this dang makeup off my face.’ Then she borrowed a pair of scissors from my wife, Christi, and went into the ladies’ room and cut off all of her hair extensions. She knew she had six hours of studio work ahead of her, and that there was no way she would ever get through it unless she was comfortable.
“She came out of the ladies’ room looking pretty damn awesome,” Workman recalled. “She was unconcerned about people taking her picture, or whatever. There was no ‘Attention! Clear the hall! Beyoncé’s fixin’ to come out after cutting off all her hair!’ She just didn’t have that sort of pretense or concern. She was authentic, and that’s what I think you get when you hear the Survivor album—her authenticity.”
Lyndall Worries About Jay Z
It wasn’t surprising to people who knew them that after Beyoncé and Lyndall broke up, they eventually got back in touch and then continued as friends. They’d been a part o
f each other’s lives for so many years, it was as if they were family. Of course, he also wanted her back as a lover and did his best to convince her. However, her mind was made up: Maybe one day, she told him, but not now. It wasn’t as if she suddenly realized that a whole world of men was available to her, either. She’d just started to become interested in someone who had clearly been fascinated with her from the start. “She started mentioning this other guy to me a lot: Jay Z,” Lyndall Locke recalled. “She began to casually drop his name into conversations, talking about ‘Jay this’ and ‘Jay that.’ ”
“As I recall it, there was a lot of gray area at this time between my son and Beyoncé,” said Lyndall’s mother, Lydia. “It was understandable. When you’ve been with someone so long, the end is not so cut-and-dried. When Mathew and Tina sent for Lyndall to join Beyoncé on the road, like they had in the past, I heard Jay Z got all bent out of shape about it.”
One afternoon, Beyoncé called from San Francisco while Lyndall wasn’t home. He returned the call, and when she picked up, he learned that she was in her hotel room playing dice with Jay Z and the popular rapper and singer-songwriter Snoop Dogg. “What the hell are you doing alone in your room with those two?” he asked.
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