Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  So now here she was at a true crossroads, faced with a crucial decision to make about her future with Mathew in light not only of present events but of past history. There was no going back anyway, was there? Even if it had not turned up any apparent wrongdoing, the audit had seriously compromised the professional trust between herself and her father. She could see no tenable future with Mathew as her manager. She had no choice and she knew it; she had to let him go. It would take courage, though. Did she have it?

  Of course, Beyoncé knew that Mathew would be devastated by her decision to break off their professional relationship. She shared his grief. However, Tina had always told her that heartache was almost always temporary, and she hung on to that thought with everything in her. “If you’re going through it, just know it’s called ‘going through it,’ ” Tina would say. “You’re not gonna get stuck there. You’re not gonna die. You’re gonna survive.”

  When all was said and done, though, the basic question still remained: Did Beyoncé believe Mathew had stolen money from her?

  Publicly, she hasn’t said one way or the other—no surprise there. According to those who know her best, though, Beyoncé is much too critical a thinker—and has been around the complex machinations of tour accounting for too many years—to believe that a onetime audit could prove any incontrovertible truth about her father. After all, there was more than just DNA holding them together. Mathew would have to go a long way down a bad road before Beyoncé would ever believe the worst of him, and it doesn’t have to do with facts or truth or evidence . . . it has to do with heart.

  Still, she knew what she had to do, maybe not only for herself but for her family as well. They had taken care of her their entire lives. Now maybe it was time for her to take care of them. It was as if she recognized that the way so many troubling events had occurred, one after the other—the public revelation of Mathew’s affair with Alex, the subsequent birth of Nixon, the audit results—presented the perfect opportunity for everyone to finally, once and for all, move on with their lives.

  Mathew Fights Back

  On March 28, 2011, in a statement from her management company, Parkwood Entertainment, Beyoncé Knowles made it official: “I’ve only parted ways with my father on a business level,” she allowed. “He is my father for life, and I love my dad dearly. I am grateful for everything he has taught me. I grew up watching both he and my mother manage and own their own businesses,” she wrote. “They were hard-working entrepreneurs and I will continue to follow in their footsteps.”

  Mathew Knowles followed suit the next day with his own prepared words: “The decision was mutual. We did great things together, and I know that she will continue to conquer new territories in music and entertainment. Business is business and family is family. I love my daughter and am very proud of who she is and all that she has achieved. I look forward to her great continued success.”

  Now that obligatory public statements had been made to put forth the image of solidarity, it was time for Mathew to unpack what had really happened. With so much on the line, he wanted—he needed—answers. “I don’t step aside,” he said. “I step up.” He had spent the better part of his life doing everything he could think of to guarantee that Beyoncé was the best in her field, that she made pop music history. Now, after everything he had sacrificed for her success, it was supposed to be over—just like that? Not so fast. He was certain Live Nation was primarily responsible for ruining everything for him, and he wasn’t going to just sit back and accept it. Instead, he hired the best lawyers he could find, and filed a legal action to investigate a potential federal claim he felt he might have against the concert promotion company.

  “I have made numerous attempts to investigate whether Live Nation played a role in my termination,” he told the court, “but I have been stonewalled at every turn. I believe that Live Nation was involved in the spreading of false rumors about me and that these false rumors contributed or caused the termination of the Personal Management Agreements between myself and Beyoncé.”

  In that filing, 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. Making things even more interesting, Faisal was still a top-level executive at Live Nation, and in fact was one of those responsible for that company’s ongoing, multi-rights association with Jay Z’s Roc Nation, worth more than $150 million. Mathew said that Duranni had been nosing around in his business and asking a lot of questions about the audit Beyoncé had conducted, and he wanted to know why. (Faisal’s role with Beyoncé would be short-lived and in retrospect appears to have been just transitional as she took over her own management duties.) Moreover, Mathew wanted access to any and all communications Beyoncé may have had with Jay about his termination.

  Also, there was the little matter of a $4 million payment made to Beyoncé by Live Nation right after she fired Mathew. Mathew wanted to know the purpose of that huge transaction. He suspected that maybe Live Nation had induced Beyoncé into some sort of side deal, something that would help her tie up loose ends with him by having them contribute money for just that purpose. In other words, if Beyoncé owed Mathew any money in their parting, Live Nation would pony it up for her. In order to figure out if this was the case, Mathew wanted any communications the company had with her relating to that payment.

  Throughout it all, Mathew strongly and adamantly denied the allegations made against him. In an interview, he stated, “We absolutely have not taken any money from Beyoncé, and all dollars will be accounted for. In no way have we stolen money.” He added, “The relationship with Beyoncé is extremely amicable. I want to make that clear. Where there’s concern is the people that she’s doing business with. I’m challenging all of these folks on integrity, professional integrity.”

  On October 4, 2011, Judge Sylvia A. Matthews of the District Court of Harris County, Texas, would rule against Mathew Knowles and in favor of Live Nation in his legal filing against the company. Thus Mathew would not be permitted to take any depositions of Live Nation executives unless he actually went the distance and filed a formal lawsuit against them. And that’s where the legal paper trail seems to end. As of this writing, for whatever reason, Mathew Knowles has not proceeded with any sort of lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment.

  4

  Beyoncé’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. They are represented on this collection by compositions like the jubilant, Motown-inspired “Love on Top,” written by Beyoncé with Terius “The-Dream” Nash and Shea Taylor. With its repeated key changes showing off Beyoncé’s soaring voice to its fullest advantage, it’s one of the most exciting of her recordings. The song’s allegiance to old-school R&B is driven home by its accompanying mus
ic video, which features Beyoncé and a male ensemble affectionately reenacting New Edition’s clip for their 1988 hit “If It Isn’t Love,” where the group is in a loft rehearsing for a concert.

  Certainly a standout on 4 is the Diane Warren ballad “I Was Here,” one of those very rare anthems recorded by Beyoncé that was not written or cowritten by her. Inspired by the September 11 attacks, it’s the perfect song for her in the way it reflects on her life and expresses her desire to leave behind some meaningful mark.

  The album also showcases the kind of unusual, experimental material she would record in the future sans Mathew. In this respect, there’s “Countdown,” with its herky-jerky horns and odd, fragmented melody. 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 commerciality. 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.

  There was also some confusion at this time as to what direction she should take; she even recorded twenty songs that were inspired by the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, coproduced by Terius Nash (which is why his and Beyoncé’s “End of Time” seems to draw from Kuti’s sound). Beyoncé had said she wanted to do something “epic,” but that’s not unusual—it’s pretty much her goal with every album. Some felt she missed the mark with 4, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. (It’s worth noting that Beyoncé’s Destiny’s Child colleague, Michelle Williams, was one of the stars of a successful, touring production of the Tony Award-winning Broadway show Fela! about Kuti, who died in 1997 of AIDS. Jay Z was one of the show’s producers.)

  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.

  Full Circle

  It was November 2011. By this time, Beyoncé and Jay were expecting their first child; she was about seven months along. She was also trying to give birth to something else that, while not as personal, still felt that way to her—she wanted to produce and codirect a documentary for HBO about herself, which she wished to title Life Is But a Dream.

  In many ways Beyoncé Knowles has had—and certainly continues to have—a life that many people would consider well worth documenting. In fact, 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.

  In late 2011, it was the star’s decision to collect many of the iterations of Beyoncé, as it were, for what would become an autobiographical documentary for HBO. She wanted to draw from her extensive archives and, along with self-narration, memorialize her current state of mind. She felt she’d grown in many ways and had been able to find the strength to fire her father as her manager by reaching deep within herself to understand who she was as a woman, his influence on her life—good and bad—and then coming to a decision about him that would not be the people-pleasing choice she might have once made, but one that reflected her new sense of personal honesty.

  A year earlier, she’d made a decision to live a more authentic life, and since that time, she’d endeavored to do just that. She’d quietly gone about the business of separating the parts of her life that felt true and organic from those that felt false and pretentious, and then moved forward committed to personal honesty and integrity. But how does one square this quest for authenticity with the strange employment of photographers to document every moment of it? The only way is to try to fathom the somewhat twisted reality of a world-famous celebrity, a person who has been famous since the age of sixteen. She’s never going to live a life most people can truly understand, or make decisions that will be wholly comprehensible to anyone other than those who also find themselves famous. Basically, at this time in her life, Beyoncé was doing her best to make certain changes within the constraints of the life she had chosen for herself. For most people, that would have been mandate enough. However, for someone like Beyoncé, there was more to it: She now felt compelled to share the journey with the world.

  The problem she faced right off was that, as it turned out, the archival footage she’d worked so hard to acquire only went back to 2005. Most of what she had prior to that year had been ruined as a result of poor storage. Since she wanted to use photos and videos of her years with Girls Tyme and its many incarnations, she telephoned her old friend Daryl Simmons for assistance. “Of course, it was great to hear from her,” Simmons said. “It’s like talking to my daughter every time we speak, that’s how I feel about her.

  “ ‘How’s little DJ?’ she wanted to know right off,” Simmons recalled. “That’s my son, who she used to babysit. ‘Well, I guess little DJ is big DJ now,’ I told her, ‘because he’s twenty-one!�
� After we laughed about that, she said, ‘You know I’m managing myself now.’ I told her I had heard. ‘It’s gonna be really hard, but I think I can do it,’ she said. I told her, ‘You’ll be fine, Bey. You’ve got a good man, Jay, at your side. He’s smart and he can help.’ After she thanked me, we got down to business.

  “She explained that she was doing a documentary and needed videos and pictures of the old days,” Daryl continued. “I told her, ‘You know what? I’ve been saving this stuff just for you. I have it right here in the same old brown Silent Partner box it’s been sitting in for years.’ She was amazed. ‘Oh my gosh,’ she said, ‘can you bring it to New York? I’ll send you a ticket.’ ‘Absolutely,’ I told her. ‘Of course!’

  “I had my engineer take all the tapes and put them on a Zip drive for her so she could access it on a computer,” he continued. “And I gathered up all the old pictures I had, stuff I forgot I even had. I put it all together and hopped on a plane for New York.”

  Once at Beyoncé’s office at Parkwood Entertainment on Broadway, Daryl sat down with her in a conference room. She looked lovely. Her light brown hair was pulled into a ponytail. She had on black slacks, a white jacket, a white blouse, and sensible heels—she was in “Beyoncé: Businesswoman” mode. “Can you believe there’s a rumor out there that I’m not really pregnant?” Beyoncé asked Daryl as she tried to get comfortable in her chair. “Just when I thought I’d heard every dumb rumor there could ever be said about me, here comes this one—the most stupid one yet.”