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Doppelgänger PopDoes Beyoncé Knowles really need an alter ego?

By Jonah WeinerPosted Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2008, at 7:15 AM ET

Beyoncé. BeyoncéThe best proof available that Beyoncé Knowles is not a cyborg came in September of 2006. It was late, outside a club, when paparazzi caught the R&B titan slumped woozily in a Maybach sedan with her hair and dress disheveled—a party girl, it seemed, after one cosmo too many. On the spectrum of celebrity gotchas, this was no Amy Winehouse moment. But it involved a star famous for her impenetrable poise—it's hard to imagine Beyoncé scratching an itch without undergoing a little media training first—so the photo dominated gossip blogs for a cycle. The picture is most revealing, though, for how unrevealing it is. Beyoncé's hair is tousled, yes, but it also hides her face; her dress is mussed, but mostly because she's tugging the hem downward, covering herself up. Beyoncé doesn't speak in the contemporary celebrity vernacular of meltdowns, nip slips, and crotch shots. In the nothing-is-private era of TMZ, she still believes there's such a thing as TMI.

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Sasha Fierce. Sasha FierceHer third solo album, I Am … Sasha Fierce, is loosely built around the theme of public facades and private truths. The first half of the disc is devoted to songs by the "real" Beyoncé, a woman, promo materials inform us, we've never heard from before. The second half showcases songs by Sasha Fierce, the flamboyant alter ego Beyoncé says she employs to armor herself against the perils of fame. In her video for "Single Ladies," a Sasha track, she dances Fosse-style while wearing a bionic hand. We aren't watching Beyoncé, it turns out, but her fembot replica.

The pop doppelgänger is not, of course, Beyoncé's innovation. Mariah Carey has Mimi, Eminem has Slim Shady, David Bowie had Ziggy Stardust, to name only a few. The impulse among musicians to create doubles—call them poppelgängers—is decades old, and it highlights one of pop music's basic contradictions: the way every performer, to some degree, becomes another person in order to express something true about himself.

In 1950, Hank Williams, already an established country star, began recording music under the name Luke the Drifter. Luke was a rambling man who performed good deeds from town to town, spreading the Lord's word as he went. In part, this split was therapeutic—Hank Williams sang about the travails of a lovelorn tippler with wandering eyes; in Luke the Drifter songs, he could reimagine himself as an upright Christian soldier. Another reason for the split was Williams' uncertainty about how audiences and radio programmers, accustomed to a certain base line of grit in his music, would take to his Ned Flanders fantasies. (The persona didn't damage his career, as he feared, but it never rivaled Hank-proper's popularity, either.)

Luke the Drifter gets at something essential about musical alter egos. Williams was grappling with the disorienting experience of being watched by millions, of being subject to a clumsy, mass gaze that doesn't see a person in full, but rather a distortion of him. When Beyoncé talks about Sasha, she's trying to own this distortion rather than let it own her. (The case of the late Russell Jones, the brilliant, X-rated hip-hop jester better known as Ol' Dirty Bastard, offers a poignant example of the latter. Friends interviewed before and after his 2004 drug overdose say that audiences expected insanity from the Ol' Dirty Bastard persona and that Jones went around the bend trying to satisfy them.)