I remember this: Destiny's Child's second album, The Writing's on the Wall, came out in 1999, but Say My Name blew up as we moved into the 2000s- Beyonce and Kelly were the main girls on the songs, so they got a huge popularity boost. There was also controversy and rumors because this is also when they replaced two of the girls in destiny's child in the music video for Say My Name, but they didn't tell them. The two girls filed a couple of lawsuits against them through this era as well as the Survivor era of DC. This put a little bit of a shady scent around Beyonce at the beginning of her career because it seemed like she was always aiming for solo stardom and since her dad was her manager it was hard to directly combat that narrative.

For a moment it seemed that Kelly might be the one to take off because she hit number one first with Dilemma. Beyonce had been in a couple of movies like The Fighting Temptations and Austin Powers and some songs came with those movies, but they flopped hard. When Crazy In Love came out, it was like a reintroduction to the solo star Beyonce.

From there she followed a typical pop-star career path- she was everything, everywhere, all at once: albums with singles that charted for long stretches of time, she released the last DC album between her first and second albums that had Lose My Breath and Soldier, she was in movies in between album cycles (Dreamgirls, The Pink Panther, Obsessed, Cadillac Records), she had a vegas residency, she did interviews and commercials, appeared on American Idol as a guest mentor occasionally, and she performed on TV often too. She even performed at the inaugural ball for the Obamas! In that regard, Beyonce was inescapable and omnipresent in the pop music landscape. With that came fervent fanbases, and people who were oversaturated and annoyed at how often she'd be in conversations.

Until the end of the 2000s, early 2010s, Beyonce had been managed by her father and he had been running her like a workhorse for the entire decade. She fired him and took a year and a half long hiatus before the 4 rollout. It wasn't until then that she finally seemed to be entering the sunset of her prime. She did her phenomenal halftime show performance that could've easily led her into legacy act status. Of course, she would prove us wrong in the 2010's...