Beyoncé
Headline:
Beyoncé: dream girl
Synopsis:
Beyoncé has it all - she's Mrs Jay-Z, the undisputed first lady of pop, a figurehead of female empowerment, a burgeoning film star and all-round bootylicious powerhouse equipped with laser-guided ambition. Tom Horan meets the $80-million-a-year diva.
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 the ones 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 $80 million, is the extraordinary singer Beyoncé Knowles.
Before I travelled to New York recently to meet the 27-year-old Texan, I had seen her perform just one song. But if you had to choose a single Beyoncé number to witness live, her 2003 breakthrough hit, Crazy in Love, would surely be it. The occasion was the 2004 Brit Awards, held on a wet Tuesday in February at that gloomy west London cowshed, the Earls Court arena. On a night notable for a particularly feeble and parochial showing from British acts, Beyoncé 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 Beyoncé 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 in Earls Court crackling with pleasure. ...
- Publish date:
- 8 November 2008
- Author:
- Tom Horan
- Source:
- Daily Telegraph
- Media:
