Beyonce Knowles released her debut album as a single artist in 2003, after the disbandment of Destiny’s Child, the female pop group that made her famous. But her artistry and even Beyonce herself indirectly admits that her real solo career wasn’t actually triggered until she fired her father as her manager and became her own leader and artistic director.
Ever since the beginning of Beyonce’s music career in Destiny’s Child, her father, Matthew Knowles, acted as her manager. Despite sharing artistic differences, the two continued their professional relationship well into her solo career after it launched with the release of the album Dangerously In Love.
At the time of DIL’s release, tensions between Beyonce and her father were just beginning to worsen. But the singer clearly still felt too attached to her father to fire him. In fact, she even expressed her deeply nostalgic affections for her dad in DIL’s hidden track, “Daddy.” The lyrics began, “I remember, when you used to take me, On a bike ride every day, on the bayou.”
At this point in the song, Beyoncé’s voice entered softly in the background saying, “Remember that? We were inseparable.” The pair’s troubles, as well as Beyonce’s longing for the past closeness they shared, were painfully alluded to in the lyrics that followed: “And I remember when you could do no wrong, You come home from work and I’d jump in your arms when I saw you.”
As much as the personal relationship meant to Beyonce, she began to feel more and more certain her working relationship with her father had to end. “I’d say ‘No’ to something, and he’d book it anyway,” the singer told Oprah years after the decision, in a recent interview. “Then I’d have to do it because I’d look bad [if I didn’t]. We would fight sometimes, and it took about two years, to when I was 20, for him to realize, ‘Oh, she is an adult now, and if she doesn’t wanna do something, I can’t make her do it.’”
The split was painful for both Beyonce and her father, but Bey finally managed to fire her father as manager just before she took a year off work and then released her album 4. Many would say this was the real album debut of Beyonce as a truly solo artist, as the artistry behind the music, touring, and branding of that album and every album that followed was entirely Beyonce’s vision, free from her father’s influence for the first time.
Matthew Knowles expressed doubts about Beyonce’s ability to handle her career on her own. But Beyonce-Artist – crowned Artist of the Decade for Billboard’s Top Radio Songs list in 2009 – proved her father wrong with the unstoppable artistic success she has become.
Beyonce’s father recently spoke about the split to the media, saying, “This was not a normal ending of a business agreement. This was a dad and a daughter and it was incredibly painful and it had some difficulties. It was hard for me to let her go – it was hard for both of us to let each other go.”
I am not sure if there are any GOOD stories of family managed pop success.
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