Producer The-Dream said Beyoncé had already recorded 20 songs to that end when she took things in a new direction. The album started life as a tribute to Nigerian afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti. 4 was her last by-the-rules album, when she seemed to realise that the rulebook no longer worked for her. While people tend to think of her 2013 surprise album as the launch of what we might call Beyoncé 2.0, it was the events of 2011 that laid the ground for what came later. Yet it has aged as one of the most consequential releases of her career. She also became pregnant between the release of lead single Run the World (Girls) and the album itself, with her first child, Blue Ivy (her name partly a phoneticism of the Roman numeral IV). The album was her lowest-selling to date. She described the album as “a gumbo of all of the things I’ve learned from my travels”.ĭespite Beyoncé’s newfound freedom, the 4 era was beset by unforeseen challenges. And, as her favourite number – linked to, among other things, the day of the month on which she, husband Jay-Z, and her mother were born her 4 April wedding anniversary and Barack Obama’s status as the United States’ 44th president – the moniker made sense. She had started work on it under a different name, but noticed that fans were calling it 4 online. The second announcement was that she would be releasing her fourth solo album, aptly titled 4, on 24 June. Now known for orchestrating some of the most talked-about projects of the 2010s, including Beyoncé’s 2013 surprise self-titled album and 2016’s visual album Lemonade, as well as developing newer acts such as sisters Chloe x Halle, in 2011, it was something closer to an idea, with Beyoncé busy assembling the “team of underdogs” that would accomplish these feats. During her time off, Parkwood Pictures, the production unit she founded in 2008 to co-produce her film projects, became Parkwood Entertainment, the management company that remains her primary creative hub. In Mathew’s absence, Beyoncé would be taking over as her own manager. And it couldn’t have helped that Mathew and Beyoncé’s mother, Tina, were in the midst of a divorce.īeyoncé with her parents Mathew and Tina Knowles in 2005. He is my father for life and I love my dad dearly,” she clarified, although public disputes about the business relationship continued. “I’ve only parted ways with my father on a business level. The first was that she was no longer being managed by her father, who had held the position since day one. When Beyoncé returned to the real world in early 2011, it was with a pair of important announcements. The proposed solution was a work hiatus, if only one in the Beyoncé sense of the word: she was back in the studio by May 2010, but otherwise spent that year travelling the world, touring cities that she’d only ever seen from the inside of hotel rooms watching movies, especially documentaries and attending at least one Rage Against the Machine concert. The 28-year-old hadn’t taken more than a couple of months off since her early teens, when her summer holidays were replaced by the “boot camps” that her father Mathew Knowles famously instituted to ready the future members of Destiny’s Child – then called Girls Tyme – for stardom. And my mother was the person that preached to me, and almost harassed me every day … ‘You really need to live your life and open your eyes, and you don’t want to wake up with no memories.’” “After I finished the last tour, I was a bit overwhelmed and overworked. If she regretted it, it didn’t show.Ī year later, in the documentary short Year of 4, she explained her decision. A few months earlier, she had cancelled two subsequent dates without explanation. It was the final stop on her I Am … World Tour. I n February 2010, Beyoncé performed in Trinidad, insisted on making an appearance at one of the hottest clubs in Port of Spain (much to the obvious dismay of her bodyguards), and flew home.