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Two years ago, the beloved early '90s R&B girl group TLC released Fanmail, the highly anticipated followup to their multi-platinum 1994 album Crazysexycool. The neo-novelty single "No Scrubs" exploded onto the charts, followed by the grammatically inventive "Unpretty." Surely, R&B fans surmised, TLC's comeback was a roaring success. But then there was all that posturing from Left Eye, and a couple of missed performances, and rumours that they were going to break up, and the music industry abhors a vacuum, and Mathew Knowles is no fool, and suddenly there was a new R&B girl group giving TLC a run for its AM radio money by whining about its bills.
Much as is the case with Jennifer Lopez, Destiny's Child's troops of publicists have, with cruel efficiency, forced the group into the public consciousness to a degree that is, by any reasonable measure, completely inappropriate given their artistic output. Three albums on, this commentator could hum a total of five Destiny's Child singles ("Bills, Bills, Bills," "Say My Name," "Independent Women Part I," "Survivor," and "Bootylicious"). Compare that to, say, the Spice Girls, whose first album yielded that many hits.
In fact, the legend of Destiny's Child is bigger, at this point, than any one single could be. Even those not intimately acquainted with the group's discography can converse with some authority about the revolving lineup of group members, the backstage machinations of Mathew Knowles (the group's manager and Beyoncé's father), and the Secondhand Rose-esque costumes designed by Beyoncé's mother, Tina. SNL's long-running Destiny's Child parody, Gemini's Twin -- in which Maya Rudolph and Ana Gasteyer portray GT's permanent members, with the third slot filled on a revolving basis by the show's various female guests hosts (including Charlize Theron and the aforementioned Lopez) -- is so artfully done that it's practically worthy of its own half-hour spinoff; when art met life and the real Destiny's Child appeared in a skit with Gemini's Twin, the DC divas sucked the air out of the place with the strain of appearing to be good sports. And yet...and yet, how has it happened that we, as a continent, even know enough about them in the first place for a parody of them to have any currency?
Because the thing is, if Left Eye had been on her meds at the time, the honour of recording the signature song for the Charlie's Angels soundtrack would have surely gone to TLC, or someone like them -- someone, say, who'd recorded more hit singles than the average human hand has fingers. But Destiny's Child never performed "Independent Women Part 1" without preening as though they'd been here all along, and had no compunction asserting that they "buy [their] own diamonds and [they] buy [their] own rings" -- quite a departure from their position just a year earlier, when they begged their anonymous boyfriends to "pay [their] bills" for them.
Mind you, it's probably a bit easier now for Beyoncé and company to pay their own bills. Why, there's the shameless and six-months-too-late Survivor rip-off: the album Survivor, the single of the same name, and the video featuring the ladies washing up on the shore of a deserted island and managing to...well, survive. There's the Target campaign. There's the L'Oréal campaign. There's that TRL summer tour. There's Beyoncé's gig hanging around the red carpet at various MTV events -- which is handy, because not a single entertainment-industry awards show can possibly go by without a Destiny's Child performance.
Given Destiny's Child's relentless ubiquity, we suppose they may be forgiven for believing that the world has embraced and memorized their entire catalogue of hits. Perhaps this commentator was the only one who found it extremely presumptuous for them to riff with a "Say My Name" parody when they presented the award for Breakthrough Female Performance at the most recent MTV Movie Awards, as though they were the goddamn Supremes cutely spoofing "Stop! In The Name Of Love." But Beyoncé is not Diana Ross, and the rest of Destiny's Child is not The Supremes, and as a result of their management team's daily challenge to find yet another new pretext to cram their exhausted carcasses into yet another trio of matching outfits and them prop them in front of yet another camera crew, Destiny's Child has been obscenely overexposed and are vastly more famous than they have any right to be.
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