With most Grammy wins, Beyoncé has perfected the art of longevity

There’s a clip of a Destiny’s Child circa 2000 that’s been circulating lately. In it, wearing orange tops and black pants, they synchronise and sing Say My Name, their Billboard No 1 megahit. At one point, Beyoncé breaks from the group and begins to ad lib as the others continue to sing the written verse. This clip, shared millions of times on Twitter, has been taken as proof that Destiny’s Child was a vehicle to launch Beyoncé’s career.

Whether that is true or not is irrelevant for many reasons. For one, in 2011, a 29-year-old Beyoncé told Cosmopolitan UK (five years after Destiny’s Child had disbanded) that she’d thought she would be retired by the time she turned 30. "Now I'm nearly there I can't believe how much more I want to do," she said. And so much more she has done in that time — coming into her own with groundbreaking music albums and formations, but also taking up space in film, art, fashion, and going on to wholly dominate the whole creative circuit.

For another, Beyoncé is a mother, a wife, a style icon, a successful businesswoman, a performer par excellence. She’s also a Black woman who once hired a Black photographer and posed for the cover of Vogue magazine, sans make-up, surrounded with flowers, while she was heavily pregnant. It’s a powerful image: Here was a woman who had unlearned how to shrink herself in every sense of the word.

With her latest album, Renaissance, still sitting pretty at the top of charts, she delves deeper into her truth. An hour long homage to her late Uncle Johnny, who she calls her godmother and who died of HIV, Renaissance is also a joyful tribute to black queer and trans icons — in its mission and the lyrics, of course, but more obviously in the sound, cooked up by longtime collaborator The-Dream. This disco, funk, R&B-soaked record that’ll have you dancing from start to finish invokes the freedom and empowerment of the safe spaces in which marginalised people didn’t only exist, but thrived.

It’s this commitment to speaking her truth, and to documenting the world as it changes under her eyes in her music, that keeps the world’s largest and most rabid fandom coming back. The Beyhive is as much an assertion of loyalty as it is a community that protects their queen bee at all costs; it gives back as much as it takes meaning and inspiration. The rapper Kid Rock probably rues the day he decided to criticise Beyoncé in public, saying he didn’t think too much of either her looks or her talent. Even now, that day is commemorated by the Beyhive which leaves bee emojis all over his social media, lest he forget.

Whole generations have grown up with Beyoncé, and value her commitment to hard work, her perceived perfectionism and her knack for the most subtle subversion. She (and her team) have invented the dance moves that we continue to ape in clubs and on Reels. Her music is, in a sense, clairvoyant — in sound and substance, it magically taps into things and absences we might be unknowingly craving at a mass level. And those words, that have for at least the last decade, been the realest that Beyoncé can be at that moment in her life.

Last Friday, days before the 65th annual Grammy awards night, music Twitter was unusually aflutter with excitement. News of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour had just been announced. Suddenly everyone was scrambling to check their bank balances, praying for tickets, joking about buying tickets and not being able to eat for four months: double win because they’d finally look exactly as thin as they needed to. Even for those of us who do not have that privilege, now’s the time to practise that viral dance to “Cuff It” — not created by Beyoncé but by a TikToker. Whatever Beyoncé wins at the Grammys, “we gon’ fuck up the night.”

Ahead of the Grammys

Expectation was that the Internet might break.

But bigger still — overdue even — would be Beyoncé taking home the Best Album award, something that has eluded her throughout her career, despite multiple nominations. In 2017, even Adele, who did win the award for her album 25, admitted on stage that she thought Beyoncé should’ve taken that trophy for Lemonade, that very experimental, highly original auteur piece.

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And yet, here we are, with both of them tied in the same category, along with Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, Brandi Carlile, Coldplay, ABBA, Mary J Blige, Lizzo and Harry Styles. In this case, history is unlikely to repeat itself — especially given the Bad Bunny juggernaut Un Verano Sin Ti in competition as well. But the Grammys were never about popular opinion alone, so it’s anyone’s guess.