Beyonce – Bumpy Road For A Child Of Destiny

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Fans call her reverently ‘Queen Bey’: Her majesty Beyonce Knowles has come a long way over a bumby road from her humble beginnings in Houston, Texas.

Her list of records seems to be a mile long but it was struggle all the way. This global superstar still travels over pot holes considering the latest revelations about her marriage to hip hop Mogul Jay Z. Apparently she dumped her husband for one year in 2005 because he got too involved with 17-year-old Rihanna. Her pregnancy in 2011 sparked a still ongoing controversy if her baby bump really belonged to her own body.

Beyonce Knowles rose to fame as the soul of ‘Destiny’s child’. Born 1981 in Houston, Texas, she dedicated her life early on to singing and dancing. At the tender age of nine she joined a group called ‘Girl’s Tyme’ and performed at local events in Houston. Her parents even took in her fellow group member Kelly Rowland, whose single mum struggled with paying the bills.

The first big bump in the road was the TV talent show Star Search in 1992. The group lost and was ready to give up. At this point, Beyonce’s father Mathew Knowles stepped up to the plate and became the group’s manager. He eventually quit his job and invested the family’s savings to help his daughter succeed. It took him six years to secure a record contract for his daughter’s group who changed names and line-ups several times. After a debacle with Silent Partner Productions, Columbia Records signed the girls in 1997.

They got their name ‘Destiny’s Child’ while recording “Killing Time” for the Men in Black movie soundtrack. It took two years to complete their first album bearing the name of the group. After disastrous experiences with stylists, Beyonce’s mother Tina designed the clothes – making the success of the album a true family affair.

Their first single sold three million copies, putting the group on the landscape. Their follow-up album, The Writings on the Wall, cemented their success in 1999 with several number one hits. It sold more than ten million copies. At the same time, the group underwent a major reshuffle. Two of the four members left and had to be replaced. The media wrote about ruffled feathers and litigation, making the group a hot commodity.

Beyonce produced and co-wrote the third album called Survivor. “There are so many people out there who want to be in my shoes. Of course, they don’t realize my shoes are uncomfortable and give me blisters,” she writes in Soul Survivors, the official autobiography of Destiny’s Child. In 2000, the group took home two Grammy awards. The year after, they won another two Grammies and five Billboard awards.

At the same time, Beyonce started to spread her wings as a solo artist. Alone she soared higher than ever before. As an actress she co-starred with Mike Myers in Goldmember. Her first solo album Dangerously in Love became a huge hit and brought her five Grammy Awards in 2003. She never commented on rumours that she was dating Jay-Z at the time. Destiny’s Child released their last album Destiny Fulfilled in 2004 and broke up the following year.

Since then, Beyonce has known success after success. She produced hits and starred next to Jaime Foxx and Jennifer Hudson in the acclaimed movie Dreamgirls.

In 2008 Beyonce finally married Jay-Z in a small ceremony in Manhattan. Together, they continued to work as hard as ever, one of the most successful couples in the music business ever. Beyonce starred as legend Etta James in Cadillac Records and scored hits like “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)”. In 2010 she launched a clothing line called House of Dereon with her mother and her own fragrance Heat. At the Grammy Awards she walked away with six honors, the most wins in a single night for a female artist.

However, her career did not protect her from bumps in the road. The media opened fire on her because she performed for the Lybian dictator Quaddafi on New Year’s Eve in 2010.

When she announced her pregnancy in August 2011 during MTV’s video music awards, she set the stage for one of the most talked and written about baby-conspiracy theories. In the following months she contradicted herself with dates confusing her attentive fans.

Her baby bump itself sparked the biggest controversy. A famous bikini picture taken with Jay-Z on a beach in Kroatia showed a very photogenic little belly – not quite believable for many. However, the video of an interview on Australia’s Sunday Night kept the controversy going around the world until today. While sitting down, the baby bump deflated and folded, fuelling rumours that the belly might have been an artificially acquired one.

Although the couple spent way more than one million $ to redecorate an entire floor of Manhattan’s Lenox Hill Hospital for the birth, the rumours did not die down. In 2014, a woman claimed to be the birth mother of their daughter and filed a maternity lawsuit. However, this woman sued the likes of Kim Kardashian and Mariah Carey for similar reasons.

The bump controversy did not keep Beyonce from producing another successful album. In 2013 she released a “visual album” with Apple, Facebook and Instagram. Before its release on midnight on December 13, it had been kept secret. Although Target and Amazon refused to sell it because they had been kept in the dark, the album sold 600,000 copies in its first three days and debuted at No. 1. The Harvard Business School conducted a study about its secret release.

Amidst all these successes, rumours about the stage of Beyonce’s marriage abound. Writer J. Randy Taraborelli describes in his book Becoming Beyonce: The Untold Story that the couple split up for a year in 2005. Beyonce had dumped her then secret boyfriend because he had become too involved with 17-year-old Rihanna while producing her first hit single.

While various people claim the couple is ready to call it quits, they just rubbished all these rumours with happy holiday pictures on instagram.

Who knows for sure? Probably it is true what Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield wrote: “Beyonce can do anything she wants to.”

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