Set the Diva Free

by David Diaz

Despite what religious defenders of Beyoncé might say, there are better songwriters than Queen B. There are better singers. Better dancers. And although few entertainers do all three as well as she does, it’s not her raw musical talent that distinguishes her as one of the biggest stars in American pop music. When Beyoncé drops an album, she consumes public attention. Not even her masterful use of the media, which she displayed in full force with her most recent release, 2016’s Lemonade, could fully explain the extent of her dominance in American music. What distinguishes Beyoncé in a competitive and cutthroat market, one in which relevance, let alone superstardom, rarely endures as long as hers has, is her flawless performance of an independent persona. The traits that sometimes earn her a reputation as a diva make her a symbol of self-confidence and power in the face of adversity. The independence and poise that Beyoncé maintains in all of her public performances, onstage and off, indicate that her self-worth comes from within. This self-assured individualism resonates among her fans and has maintained her popularity.

Despite her independent persona, Beyoncé performed as a member of a group for much of her career. According to people who knew her when she was young, Beyoncé was quite shy, so she began studying dance in part to make friends. She succeeded. Beyoncé and her friends formed the group that would later become famous as Destiny’s Child. The young women of Destiny’s Child were like sisters. Music groups often form tight bonds early in their careers because of shared experiences trying to make it big in a difficult industry. Additionally, a collective artistic effort creates special relationships between collaborators. Musical performance requires listening to the people around you and trying to make sure that your sound blends in well with those of others. Choreographed dance, likewise, requires precise synchrony between group members. The emotional and social awareness required to perform in a group facilitates cohesion in relationships, allowing individualists like Beyoncé to find a place in a collective. 

However, this tale of unity and sisterhood is not the narrative that persists in the public memory of Destiny’s Child. Many fans blame Beyoncé for the group’s collapse. At the very least, they blame the people around her who wanted to make her a superstar. They accuse Beyoncé of being difficult to work with, of being a diva, and of being selfish. The saga of personnel changes that culminated in Destiny’s Child’s dissolution suggest that music doesn’t naturally unify performers as much as I theorized above. One might assume from this narrative that people—especially musicians, and especially female musicians—are inherently too dramatic and egotistical to collaborate for more than a few years. However, this view fails to consider the history of women in the American popular music tradition and the reasons why people decide to dedicate their lives to musical performance.

The Andrews Sisters were the most popular girl group of the first half of the twentieth century. Made up of three sisters, Patty, Maxene, and Laverne, the group dominated radio waves and jukeboxes during the 1940s. They had performed close harmony swing together since childhood. Their precise harmonies and dance moves required constant practice and time with each other. Needless to say, their musical careers made them extremely close. The structure of the music industry, however, restricted women’s creative role in musicianship and caused tension within the trio. Men wrote and arranged nearly all of the songs that women recorded. The women’s roles as vocalists demanded that they execute the arrangements with little artistic input. Many talented female vocalists found clever ways to express their creativity despite these restrictions. Many black women, for example, used scat-singing. Unfortunately for the Andrews Sisters, their precise style of close harmonies was not conducive to improvisation because they had to blend in with each other. Close harmony rejects radical sounds and unplanned innovation, and for the creative female vocalist, singing in a group of that genre meant submitting to artistic constraint.

Patty Andrews, the lead singer of the Andrews Sisters, felt limited within the sister act. She had always preferred songs that gave her more solos: more room to hold notes until she felt they were done, more freedom to growl or improvise the melody. Eventually, even these momentary outlets for vocal spontaneity were not enough for Patty, and she decided to try and make it as a soloist. Patty’s departure devastated Maxene and Laverne, and caused irreparable damage to the relationship between Patty and her sisters. To make matters worse, unlike Beyoncé’s, Patty’s solo career flopped. Like in Beyoncé’s situation, the media spread a narrative that diminished the seriousness of Patty’s motivation to seek a solo career. By writing off the breakups of both the Andrews Sisters and Destiny’s Child as catfights among selfish, fame-seeking women, we ignore the structures that obstruct female creativity in musical performance. In doing so, we drive female performers to seek more individual, freer forms of artistic expression.

Although music undoubtedly provides an outlet for kinship through shared experience and collaboration among performers, part of becoming an artist is finding outlets to express one’s individual talent. Listeners often forget the radical creativity of past performers. The historic innovations of Billie Holiday, Tina Turner, and Amy Winehouse could have only happened in solo performances. By arguing that solo careers have facilitated more creative vocal expression than group careers, I do not mean to denigrate group performance as restrictive. Vocal harmony requires creativity, and a vocal solo holds singers under certain constraints that give structure to expression. Rather than single out the restrictiveness of vocal groups, I hope to shed light on the persistent structural restrictions on female creativity in the American popular music tradition. Although some barriers of access to music composition have been lifted for women since the time of the Andrews Sisters, modern-day production teams outsource creativity from the vocalists for whom they write. Beyoncé’s independence as a public figure speaks to the desire of her and other female vocalists to reclaim their careers as artists.