^ I'm with u on that one. That would be so hot.

Bday Booklet :

Beyonce explains her infamous maple syrup diet to Sasha Perera

Q: WHICH release are you most anxious about: your new album B'Day or your girl-group movie Dreamgirls?

A: Releasing an album is scary. It's been just as scary since the first album. Now I've done eight or nine projects, including the Destiny's Child records, which are all the same to me, but every time you just get really nervous.

You lost 6kg in 10 days for your role in Dreamgirls by eating only maple syrup. Do you wish you'd never mentioned that diet?

I mean, it's fine. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who wants to lose weight unless they were doing a movie and they needed to lose it in two weeks because it was part of the movie. When an actor tries to take a role really seriously and tries to make a physical transformation, people are amazed by it, even though it's part of their job. I think because I'm (usually) a singer, people just can't grasp that was part of my (acting) job.

As a high-profile celebrity, do you feel very responsible for the things you say and do?

I'm conscious of it, but I don't feel responsible. I'm responsible for myself, and I don't have children, so until I have children I'll be responsible for myself. I feel like my mother was responsible for me and she told me that certain things weren't allowed in her house. I couldn't listen to certain things and I couldn't watch certain things. When I liked certain outfits, she would say, "Well, she's an adult and you're a kid so you can't be like her." I feel like it's the parents' responsibility to raise their children. Even though I like Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye and all these other people, they didn't raise me -- my mother did. I don't understand why certain people blame things on celebrities for kids, because ultimately you buy the cable (TV) and you should be monitoring your children because it's a parent's responsibility to do that. I am conscious, though, so I try not to do anything that I wouldn't be proud of years from now.

Did you ask your boyfriend Jay-Z for his thoughts on your new album B'Day?

I played the records for him and for his friends and my friends and my cousins -- I played it for everyone to kind of narrow down the 22 songs (recorded). I always do that. Ultimately I already know what I want, but I do like people's opinions. Even with my last record, Dangerously In Love, I did more songs than I needed and I had a group of critics write down what they thought. I had a group of fans write it down, and I had my friends do the same. Then I averaged it out along with what I thought, and I took other people's opinions into consideration.

On your next single Ring the Alarm you sound angry. What are you really like when you're mad?

I really don't get angry and I don't scream like that. That was my release of all the anger that I was feeling from the character (Deena from Dreamgirls) and I was speaking for all the women that may feel the same way. In real life I'm really calm. I'll get agitated, but I'll do it with a look or I'll just say someone's name one time.

So what does make you angry?

Y'know, the same things that make someone else angry -- when someone's not loyal or not telling the truth or when someone disappoints me or lies. I'm really professional and I try to be on time and my word means everything to me, so when I say something, I do it, and I just feel like everyone else should be that way too -- so when someone isn't, it disappoints me. It's not even anger so much as it is disappointment. My father makes me angry -- when I say no to something and he keeps badgering me about doing it. I just get to the point where I say, "Daddy, no", but he knows that voice and he knows that tone.

Is it true that for the album photography you had to pose with an alligator -- are you the new Crocodile Hunter?

I am! Y'know, I always loved the pictures of women holding the dobermans and I just always thought the contrast of the femininity of a woman holding that fierce doberman was just kind of strange and hot. I was in Louisiana, so the crocodile is what the doberman is, and it was in post-production, and I just thought it was strange and hot and sexy. I didn't hold one, though. The alligators were superimposed (digitally).

Did you have any childhood inspirations that still inspire you now?

When I was recording my album I had Michael Jackson on the projector screen and I had Marvin Gaye and I had Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, and all the people I love. So subconsciously they were in my mind when I was writing the records, just so I could stay soulful. Growing up, when I was a little girl, like everyone else, I thought Michael Jackson was my boyfriend. You know, in the '80s I was young and had my jacket and my glove.

Have you ever been hurt by album/concert reviews? How do you deal with that?

Yeah, I have. Now I don't read my album reviews. I've never read my acting reviews. The only time I read any of those is if I'm looking through a magazine and I just happen to come across it. I can't help see what they said. I won't go looking or I won't go asking to see them. Concert reviews I do read. The first two weeks, that's my rule. I've been on enough concert tours to know that after two weeks I can compare and see if they have the same thing to say. And if it's consistent, then it's something I should probably change, and I'll think about it. If it's all random, then I just don't pay attention. I do feel that at the beginning of a tour you're still working things out, so sometimes it's helpful.

The anniversary of September 11 is looming. Given the current political climate and terrorist threats, are you scared of travelling the world?

You just never know what's going to happen in America or anywhere. One thing I just don't want to do is hide from anything. There's no way to prevent anything in life, unless you stay in your house, and even then, you just don't know what's going to

30 sec. Clip of the deja vu performance on Ellen : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnQNCewU4AU

Beyonce was on the sharon osbourne show in the uk y'day. She wasn't live in the studio, just a typical press hotel room. She talked about doin album in two weeks, acting,dreamgirls, deja vu video AND Sharon talked about the VMAS!!!!! Sharon said that she was on the voting comitee and that she VOTED FOR BEYONCE!

HQ Pic With Gators Inside :

Australia Peps dont forget yall get Bday On September 2th !!!

Ti was supposed to Be on upgrade U :
As one of the biggest artists to emerge in the past 15 years, Beyoncé Knowles is inhabiting a hemisphere where greatness is just considered good enough, and sometimes fans' expectations border on the unreasonable.

So B'Day, which comes on the heels of her quadruple-platinum solo debut Dangerously in Love — which won her five Grammy Awards in 2004 — has a tough act to follow.The album's lead cut "Deja Vu," a dynamite hybrid of soul and hip-hop, has already come under fire as being a less effective pairing with boyfriend Jay-Z than their last collaboration, the blockbuster single "Crazy in Love." Despite the criticism, the track has been filling dance floors and hit #1 on two of Billboard's singles charts.

But what about the rest of B'Day?

Well, it's obvious that hanging out with the Jiggaman's rap-world friends has rubbed off on Beyoncé: B'Day is a sonically harder, decidedly more street LP than Dangerously in Love. B has chalked that shift up to Deena Jones, her fierce character in the upcoming film "Dreamgirls." Beyoncé drew inspiration from the assertive siren, who knows when to play to her man's ego to get what she wants (see "Beyonce Slimming Down And 'Completely Becoming Deena' ").

"You need a real woman in your life, that's a good look," she sings on "Upgrade You," the album's second collaboration with Jay-Z "Take care of home and still fly, that's a good look." Swizz Beatz co-produced and T.I. also recorded a verse for the song, but it did not make the cut. She later adds, "I can do for you like Martin did for the people/ It's very seldom you're blessed to find your equal, still play my part and let you take the lead role."

On "Suga Mama," where producer Rich Harrison dips the beat in '70s funk and sprinkles in a little '80s go-go flavor, Beyoncé holds back nothing — she's totally sprung and doesn't mind if she has to trick some dough to keep her man happy. She even tells the guy to come sit on her lap. "It's so good to the point that I'll do anything just to keep you home," she proclaims. "Tell me what you want me to buy, my accountant's waiting on the phone."
B's girls are waiting on the dance floor during "Get Me Bodied." Before you think she's getting political and talking about murder rates, "bodied" here is what she's doing to the sound of the rhythm. "It's a dance record," she explained recently in New York, "and it's a feel-good record. To get bodied means that someone killed you on the dance floor. 'I bodied you. You bodied me. I got bodied.' "

Swizz Beatz, who seems to be Knowles' favorite producer these days (he's behind her current single, the urgent "Ring the Alarm," as well as this year's "Pink Panther" release "Check on It"), is developing a real chemistry with the Houston singer. On B'Day he provides her with beats that the most hard-core MC would love to spit to, which allow B to explore her more explosive side.

"I love the record because it's honest," she said about "Ring the Alarm." "I think people will be surprised, 'cause it shows a lot of vulnerability for a woman to say, 'Yeah, I don't want you, but somebody else is gonna step in and benefit from all of the things I taught you.'

"You know, women clean up men sometimes," she continued, explaining one of the many songs on B'Day that explore relationships. "Not all women, not all men, but sometimes they dress different, they learn a lot of things. They learn how to be a man and then if they dog you out and you move on, another woman benefits from all of those things.

"So I'm sayin', 'Ring the alarm, I've been through this too long/ But I'll be damned if I see another chick on your arm,' " she added.

While "Ring the Alarm" shows Beyoncé at her most irrational during a breakup (she dressed up like Sharon Stone in the video, for heaven's sake), "Irreplaceable" finds her in a more lucid but still determined state. "You must not know 'bout me," she repeatedly sings over slow guitars. Listeners can visualize Beyoncé literally kicking her man to the curb as she gets harsh and orders him to talk and walk at the same time because she has a new beau coming over any minute. "Baby, drop them keys, hurry up before your taxi leaves."

There are also a few hidden tracks on the album, including "Listen," which is "a song in 'Dreamgirls,' one of the only new songs in the movie," B explained (see "New Beyonce Single — And Eddie Murphy Singing — Featured In 'Dreamgirls' ").

"It's so strong and every woman has been there. [Deena] says she feels she's not at home in her own home, and it is the moment where she is fed up," Beyoncé said. "She wants [her husband] to listen because as women we always take care of everything. We're the rocks. We always listen to everyone's problem and it is time for him to listen to her. It sounds like an old Whitney Houston anthem — it is just a powerful record."

B'Day drops on September 5.


http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/153...headlines=true

New Loreal Add :


i love it

Inspirations: Beyonce

With her second solo album, ''B'Day,'' due in stores Sept. 5, the R&B star tells EW's Margeaux Watson about seven key things that have influenced her career

Diana Ross
''She's an all-around entertainer: a great actor, a good singer, and a beautiful, elegant woman. She's one of the few singers able to cross over into really good movies.''

Rachelle Ferrell
''A jazz singer I grew up listening to. My voice teacher listened to her; that's what I'd sing during my voice lessons. She uses her voice like an instrument.''

St. John's United Methodist Church, Houston
''You can be sitting next to a recovering alcoholic or a homeless person, but we're all the same...we're there to get the same thing.''

The Color Purple
''The type of movie you wish you could have been a part of. It made me cry, it made me laugh, it reminded me of my family, and it made me want to act.''

Anita Baker
''My mother played her and Luther Vandross all day at her hair salon. I always performed her music when I made my mom's friends watch me sing.''

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
''There's definitely something beyond Lauryn Hill that's in her voice and her mind when she writes songs. She's gifted and blessed.''

Oprah Winfrey
''The definition of inspiration and a strong woman. When I'm around her, I want to stand up straight, pronounce my words right, and articulate.''

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1449204_4_0_,00.html

Ugh@ Beyonce. T.I. eould have made Upgrade U PERFECT.

Snippets of 2 new reviews.

A snippet from a ****/5 review:
....her decision to use the ambiguous abbreviation "B-Day" has landed her, as it were, in the toilet - or at least, in the porcelain bowl often found alongside it. What, one wonders, did she think that extra bowl was for in all those foreign hotels?

Oh well, they'll only be laughing in Europe - and she's likely to have the last laugh, as B-Day may be the most potent work she's ever been associated with, a giant step beyond her Destiny's Child recordings and her 2003 solo debut Dangerously In Love. It's not any great revelation in terms of either her vocal technique or lyrical concerns, which stick to the standard R&B diva themes of assertive sexuality, possessiveness, bling-tastic materialism and romantic betrayal; but thanks to the sterling work of her co-producers, notably Swizz Beatz, it's delivered with the kind of nonchalant panache her rivals struggle to achieve. She actually seems to have a distinctive character, rather than just a series of vocal tics and tricks, and it's that which enables us to care about the emotional travails that drive the songs.
Source: http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/m...cle1222965.ece


A snippet from another review (also, ****/5)

It's easy to assume that, since her solo career launched with 2003's five-Grammy Dangerously in Love album, Beyoncé has been keener on increasing her pop appeal than catering for the urban fanbase of her Destiny's Child days. But that reckons without the influence of boyfriend Jay-Z - he only appears twice, but leaves behind a trail of raw beats and raw sexuality. Their duet on the magnificent Deja Vu is as feverish as pre-watershed pop gets, but even when Jay-Z is not physically present, he brings out something formidable in Beyoncé that evokes the young, feral Tina Turner.
Source: http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmu...861825,00.html

I went to the shops today to look for it even though its out tomoro, i found it at one place and it was right there infront of me but the guy couldnt sell it to me I just felt like grabbing it and running lol

Im getting it straight after work tomoro

Damn if she would have had TI. She could have released Upgrade U.

Those must have been the preorders that were made,

i was no. 573 on the preorders so i expect an autographed Beyonce CD next week cause it was said that she will autograph the first 1000 CD's preordered and i also expect a beyonce poster.

i know with the preorders her first week Sales will be over 700,000 and the followin' week when justin CD comes out, Beyonce only need to sell around the same amount of CDs, if she sells like 500,000 the second week she might be able to hold off justin timberlake. i will also gon get some more copies from stores for my friends.

Beyoncé Takes Over

Look past the movies and the new fashion line—she’s making the best music of her career.
By Ben Williams

It’s easy to imagine Beyoncé Knowles as a cyborg created to rule an elite cadre of one-named female singers (Christina, Ciara, Cassie, Kelis, Rihanna, LeToya, Nelly, Jessica, Paris). After all, the woman’s quest for multimedia dominance is relentless. This fall alone, she stars in Dreamgirls, a movie about a Supremes-like girl group (Beyoncé plays the Diana character, naturally). She introduces a new clothing line, the House of Deréon. And she gets to treat the Greatest Rapper Alive™, Jay-Z, as an accessory on “Déjà Vu,” the first track on her new album, B’Day (“Bass … hi-hat … 808 … Jay,” goes the intro).

Recording over a couple of weeks when she was supposed to be on vacation, Beyoncé worked with an all-star lineup of producers, combining hip-hop hard beats and depth-charge bass lines with bluesy guitars and gutsy horn charts. Her singing is more direct than ever. “I used to do a lot more runs and fills,” she tells me over the phone from Europe, “and here I just concentrated on the melodies. I was really working with beats that most R&B singers don’t work with. Like with Swizz [Beatz]—his tracks are just a blank canvas for me to work on top of. I can put any melody I want on there, and it has to be pretty powerful in order to compete with the music.”

The result is not just the best album of Beyoncé’s career, but also her first truly adult work. Sure, Destiny’s Child tracks like “Bills, Bills, Bills” and “Independent Women Part I” were plenty assertive, but they sounded more like dictates from the queen of the Heathers than new-feminist anthems. Her first solo album, Dangerously in Love, buried brilliant singles (“Crazy in Love,” “Baby Boy”) under an avalanche of saccharine ballads.

B’Day, in contrast, sequences one storming dance track after another. Yet Beyoncé also manages to add vulnerability to her repertoire. In the video for the second single, “Ring the Alarm,” a futuristic song in the oldest R&B genre of all, the woman scorned, she looks genuinely demented as she practically shouts the lyrics. The song, which plays into the rumors of Jay-Z’s infidelity, marks ­Beyoncé’s ascension to the pinnacle of celebrity culture: the obsessively parsed tabloid relationship.

Beyoncé denies the rumors, of course—“I’m so not going through that in my life right now, but I have gone through that, and I wanted to make a record that women could relate to,” she says—and she has a ­nifty strategy for deflecting autobiographical readings: the fiery songs on B’Day apparently represent all the things she wished her well-­behaved Dreamgirls character, Deena, could have said. At her level of stardom, the truth barely matters. We’ve followed Jay and B through the blossoming of their romance (“ ’03 Bonnie and Clyde,” “Crazy in Love”); now the narrative demands marriage (also much rumored this summer), an affair, or both.

That’s no guarantee of a hit, as plenty of movie couples who tied their personal lives to their release calendars have found. After “Déjà Vu” failed to rule the summer as it was supposed to, Beyoncé could use one. “I can’t make the same record that I made before, and I hope people will realize that and follow me,” she says. As good as B’Day is, they should.


— B’Day, Sony; September 4

Source: http://nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/...735/index.html

Billboard reviews B'Day


B'DayBEYONCÉRelease Date: September 05, 2006
Producer(s): various
Genre: R & B
Label: Columbia/Sony Urban Music



Beyoncé plays up both her naughty and nice sides on the follow-up to her multiplatinum solo debut, "Dangerously in Love." While lead single "Déjà Vu" was viewed by many as simply "Crazy in Love" part two, they've got another thing coming in terms of the album's other tracks. It's a rockier, edgier Beyoncé belting out her I'm-my-own woman perspective on such intense tracks as "Ring the Alarm," the Tina Turner-esque funk/rock fest "Suga Mama" and the slick, wicked "Kitty Kat." Beyoncé shifts into emotive mode on the ballad "Resentment," which calls to mind the subtle fervor and passion of the best girl groups of the '60s and '70s. Throughout, she romps with creative abandon, thankfully unafraid of stretching the boundaries lyrically and musically. And in the process, she tosses the age-old notion of a sophomore slump on its ear. —Gail Mitchell

I bought it and i just finished listening to it. Its amazing! BEST ALBUM OUT THIS YEAR.

^ I bet it is!! I can't wait to get my copy, only 3 more days left!!!