In the music video for “Flawless,” Beyoncé splices in a clip of her on “Star Search” as a child with Girls Tyme, the group that would later become Destiny’s Child. What’s remarkable about the clip isn’t that Beyoncé has it—she keeps an archive of virtually every recorded moment of her life, temperature-controlled and cordoned off like a business data center—but that Girls Tyme lost to a folk-rock group that sounds like the midpoint of Sophie B. Hawkins and Michael Bolton.
There is no better microcosm of what happened to Top 40 music between 1993 and 1999 than this. Bands like the “Star Search” winner were buried in a landfill of post-grunge, while R&B groups built out from soul and quiet storm to create a sound innovative enough to earn the “futuristic” label almost everything got in that pre-Y2K time. This bore itself out in the revival in the early-to-mid-’90s of excellent girl groups vaguely in the Supremes mold—TLC, En Vogue, SWV—but it would be Destiny’s Child who would become their true successors.
The Writing’s on the Wall, one of the best-selling R&B albums of all time, is perhaps most known for what was going on behind the scenes. In spring of 2000, founding members LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson fired, through an attorney, Mathew Knowles, the group’s replacement for late manager Andretta Tillman and, more importantly, Beyoncé’s father. They alleged that Mathew Knowles kept too much of the group’s profits and that the group’s attention was disproportionately allocated in favor of Kelly Rowland and Beyoncé, increasingly featured both as lead singer and in promo. “Ninety percent of the vocals you're hearing is Beyoncé and Kelly,” Mathew Knowles rebutted in the Houston Chronicle, “but they all got paid the same.”
But the two only expected a change in management, perhaps mediation, until the video for “Say My Name” came out and Luckett and Roberson saw, for the first time, their replacements: Michelle Williams, a former backup singer for Monica, and Farrah Franklin, a dancer from the “Bills, Bills, Bills” video. That Joseph Kahn-directed clip, four minutes of posing in color-coordinated rooms, became one of the defining “TRL”-era music video trends—in the past year alone it’s gotten at least two homages in Kehlani’s “Distraction” and Tove Styrke’s otherwise unrelated “Say My Name.” But it was a product of necessity—Luckett and Roberson were dismissed so quickly that there wasn’t time for the two newcomers to learn much choreography.
The ensuing years of lawsuits, accusations, and characteristically Southern bless-her-hearts didn’t hinder the group’s sales—The Writing’s on the Wall still “sold nine million,” as Knowles said on the title track of their follow-up Survivor—but dominated both the tabloids and the more respectable outlets so thoroughly that Beyoncé, Rowland, and Williams would spend the next eighteen years smoothing it over and eventually rolling it into their own narratives. The name of the album is the first of what would be Beyoncé’s many rebuttals to the press one too many commentators joked about how compared the group’s ever-shrinking lineup to the reality show of the same name.
By most accounts, The Writing’s on the Wall was the moment the members of Destiny’s Child took much-needed creative control. The group’s childhood stint on “Star Search” made an R&B career seem achievable, but the path to achieving it involved years of grueling artist development in the girls’ teens with training “boot camps” each summer: strict daily regimens of jogging, voice and dance lessons, often at once, constant rehearsing, tears. “We weren’t allowed to leave the house except to go jogging,” Roberson recalled. “We had to watch old videos of people like the Supremes and the Jackson 5.” Indeed, Joe Jackson was a role model to Mathew Knowles, for better and worse, and his actions figured into Luckett and Roberson’s lawsuit. When Destiny’s Child’s debut came out on Columbia, they were still in their teens, and it too was the product of a lot of behind-the-scenes hustling—a failed partnership with Elektra Records, a lot of producers and directors tried out and dismissed.
The result was something of a baby neo-soul album that even Beyoncé admitted was an awkward fit for the then-teens. The Writing’s on the Wall, by contrast, was recorded quickly, in about three weeks, and feels like it. Everyone sounds hungry, everyone has new ideas. You can tell from the intro alone: a Godfather-inspired sitdown, steeped in drama with a take of Spanish guitar from Andy Williams’ “Speak Softly, Love” and kept there by the four women styling themselves as Mafia dons—the capo di tutto capi played by, naturally, “Beyoncé Corleone, from the Southwest.” What seemed silly at the time coming from a barely established girl group makes more sense decades of concept albums and a world domination later.
Many of these new ideas came from of the album’s new production duo: songwriter Kandi Burruss, formerly of Xscape, and producer Kevin “She’skpere” Briggs, both fresh off a breakthrough smash, TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Originally brought in for just one track, Burruss and Briggs not only ended up with five tracks but crafted its most recognizable sound: guitar riffs chiseled to a point like stiletto heels, hitting in precisely choreographed time; knotty percussion arrangements, record scratches, bubbles and breaking glass arranged into a dense mesh; orchestral brass draped in the background like plush curtains; vocals wound in and around like scrollwork.
Along with Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who reprises the thick, paranoid mix of “The Boy Is Mine” for “Say My Name,” Briggs and Burruss craft a singular style that, compared to the minimalist arrangements of today, is downright rococo. At least one early mix of “Say My Name” was tossed out by the group for being too crowded and fussy, a sentiment most reviewers at the time echoed. Now, it’s fascinating to hear, a sonic Rube Goldberg machine. Even the simpler tracks were relentless and intimidating, like the instrumental to “Bug a Boo,” mostly just a looped Toto sample. The group was baffled with what they’d even do with it. “At the time people weren’t really singing over those types of tracks,” Burruss said. “You’d look at it as something they’d rap over.”
Rapping was no problem for Destiny’s Child; their early “Star Search” incarnation was as singer-rappers, with emphasis on the latter. Their grown-up adaptation of rap—melodic R&B delivered in soon-to-be-trademark staccato vocals—had a soft launch in the group’s breakout hit, “No, No, No (Pt. 2),” encouraged by collaborator Wyclef Jean. And of course in the R&B waters at the time was the undeniable influence of Timbaland, most notably 1998’s destined-for-the-canon Aaliyah track “Are You That Somebody.” Curiously, Timbaland and Destiny’s Child’s paths barely crossed. Tim produced their inessential soundtrack cut “Get on the Bus,” proving the two artists had an inexplicably poor fit. Missy Elliott produced one track on The Writing’s on the Wall as a surrogate, there’s a gag reference to “No, No No” on Timbaland’s Jay Z collaboration “Lobster and Scrimp,” but that’s about it.
Timbaland’s influence was felt nevertheless. In 2000, the Village Voice called The Writing’s on the Wall “...the Aaliyah album Aaliyah didn’t make.” While there are hints of Aaliyah’s shyer, more stylized vocals on The Writing’s on the Wall, particularly in Luckett’s feathery soprano harmonies, a more typical Destiny’s Child vocal is brassier, more conversational, virtuosic in a sneakier way. The verses of “Say My Name,” ricocheting from double-time to triple and back, are as technically skilled as any number of acclaimed rappers but never obvious about it. (Like any No. 1 hit, “Say My Name” has been endlessly covered, but there’s a reason most people stick to the chorus or slow it down to languid, unchallenging speeds.) “That staccato, fast singing has kind of become the sound of R&B. It’s still here in 2006,” Knowles told The Guardian. It’s still here in 2017, too; examples are too abundant to list, but the reigning king is Drake on almost anything—including, on “Girls Love Beyoncé,” his own ersatz Destiny’s Child song.
The Writing’s on the Wall is presented with a loose religious theme—each track is introduced in the form of a Commandment, and the album ends with a prayer: “Amazing Grace,” dedicated to late manager Andretta Tillman. Specifically, its theme is confession: a catalog of relationships and the failings thereof. This was, and is, fraught territory. Practically since the album’s release, Destiny’s Child have dodged accusations of man-hating. Beyoncé stood in front of that giant FEMINIST display at the VMAs not as a response to a couple of thinkpieces but to over a decade of misinterpretations of her work, starting here. Forget the dated technological references in “Bug a Boo,” its hapless-clinger archetype has stalked his way from pagers to cell phones to today’s social media. “Bills, Bills, Bills” was so vastly misunderstood the group had to patiently re-explain it in almost every interview. This particular scrub isn’t just broke, but a brokeness vortex; he drains her girlfriend’s gas tank, maxes out her credit cards and ruins her credit. Maybe it’s a testament to the comparatively flush 1999 economy that this almost sounds quaint. (The lady he’s running up her bills with? His mama.)
Beyoncé, in particular, would develop this theme at length throughout her career: money as a weapon, wielded by and against women. It’s the last straw of “Hey Ladies”: “The worst thing of it all was that he gave her money/Now, how he gonna give her my ends?/That’s a no-no.” And it’s one of the many indiscretions on “Confessions”: “Remember that time you wondered where your money went?” The bridge professes contrition, but Missy’s track suggests the lie; the sweet-seeming guitar line curdles within seconds, dropping out ever so often to punctuate lines. The track is a game of confession chicken with Beyoncé delivering, in carefully measured detail, “He kissed me like a guy could never kiss a girl before.” These aren’t the words of someone who's sorry, at least not just sorry. Confessional music in the ’90s is often thought of as the work of gamine singer-songwriters. But The Writing’s on the Wall, along with TLC’s CrazySexyCool, are the template for the 1990s’ other strain of confessional music—it’s right there in the title—and the one that’s survived most into 2017.
Destiny’s Child were still in their teens when The Writing’s on the Wall was recorded, so it’s natural for them to still try on styles. But while its pop and R&B sections are distinct, they’re equally assured. On the pop side, there’s “Jumpin’ Jumpin,” Beyoncé’s only production credit on the album and a test run of sorts for her solo singles: most obviously “Single Ladies,” but also the constant escalation seen on cuts like “Love on Top.” The R&B tracks, meanwhile, root Destiny’s Child in history, a fact unfortunately downplayed by the public once the girl group became the girl group of its era. The coy, pillowy “Temptation,” and the wistfully romantic “If You Leave” present a dyad of unconsummated, nuanced yearning, directly to the feelings. The former is produced by D’Wayne Wiggins of Tony! Toni! Toné! and the latter a duet with Next, both of whom provide gravitas beyond mere filler. “Sweet Sixteen” was originally recorded as “16” by Jody Watley of Shalamar for her album Flower; besides a rawer lead vocal by LaTavia, the track is left reverently unchanged. It’s undeniably compelling but a clear outlier—a nod to legacy by an act on the cusp of creating its own.
In a way, The Writing’s on the Wall is a victim of its own success. The album was released to muted critical response, was not nominated for an Album of the Year Grammy (unusual for one with its sales) and was, Beyoncé recalled, something of a hard sell. “You have to remember at that time that we'd talk to people at the record company and they'd say, ‘Look, they don't even play R&B in Europe right now,’” she told The Guardian. It’s now been so subsumed into the sound of pop and R&B the 2000s, not to mention into each alumna’s solo work, that the original no longer sounds surprising. But it’s important to remember that the sound of 1999, as actually experienced in 1999, was rather dismal: a chintzy early Max Martin sound that Max Martin would abandon almost immediately, goofy soft-rock, a watered-down facsimile of a “Latin invasion”—and R&B, eclipsing the rest in innovation.
Since the beginning of popular music, pop and rock have routinely borrowed—or stolen—R&B’s tricks, and conditions in 1999 were particularly ripe for this kind of crossover. The industry had money, which always helps. And unlike today, with Top 40 and urban radio playlists so siloed that a track like “Bad and Boujee” can reach No. 1 and still have pop radio barely touch it, Destiny’s Child could routinely top all the major charts. They could enter one millennium opening for Dru Hill and enter the next one touring with TLC and Christina Aguilera. And echoing the Supremes, they could firmly plant themselves atop the lineage of girl groups, while codifying the sound and subject of popular music for the foreseeable future.
