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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

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In hip-hop, most poppelgängers—as opposed to aliases, which abound—crop up on the genre's weirdo margins: Kool Keith recording as Dr. Dooom and Dr. Octagon; RZA recording as Bobby Digital; MF Doom recording as Viktor Vaughn. Eminem and T.I., though, have taken the tradition into the mainstream. T.I.'s 2007 album, T.I. vs. T.I.P., contrasted the Atlanta MC's pop-crossover and unreconstructed-gangsta sides, a duality that speaks to the fundamental paradox written into gangsta rap—namely, that real gangstas don't rap.

Eminem is the most fascinating persona factory in recent pop history. The way he splinters himself into different characters suggests Peter Sellers or an angrier Andy Kaufman: His identity play is anarchic, screwball, infinitely slippery. Roughly, Marshall Mathers is the real guy, and Eminem and Slim Shady are different parts of his id. They allow him to rap about murdering his wife while claiming ironic distance from the fantasy, to revile his needy fans one moment and sympathize with their obsessions the next. Eminem provoked pop music's last great parent-group outcry, and in part, his identity play explores the limits of artistic responsibility: I didn't say it, an imaginary character did! On "Ass Like That," one of the most dazzlingly layered songs on his last album, Marshall Mathers rapped as Eminem rapping as Robert Smigel rapping as Triumph the Insult Comic Dog rapping as a pedophiliac Michael Jackson rapping as Arnold Schwarzenegger. Exhilarating and destabilizing, it was a madcap, atomized vision of the self as puppet show.

There can be something self-indulgent, low-concept, or stuntlike about many pop alter egos. Garth Brooks will never live down his silly incarnation as rocker Chris Gaines. Mariah Carey's Mimi helped her to move from the girly devotionals of her Rainbow- and Butterfly-era career to her current hot-pants hypersexuality—but her characterization of this as some great personal awakening was comically solipsistic. And Beyoncé's poppelgänger move on I Am … Sasha Fierce is, in the end, a huckster's feint: The so-called unguarded tracks offer us no deeper understanding of Beyoncé, unless you count the revelation, on the shivering power ballad "If I Were a Boy," that this booty-shaking, beauty-shop feminist has feelings, too, and that they that can be hurt. Beyoncé's personality split, at least as it's explored here, comes off like a talking point.

Ultimately, the poppelgänger is redundant, because all pop artists present a persona to the world. Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. Louise Ciccone became Madonna. These are two of pop's biggest shape-shifters—different people, it can seem, from one album to the next—but the same principle holds true with the most transparent, reliable, and sincere of singer-songwriters. The moment John Mayer approaches a microphone, in other words, he becomes "John Mayer." It was this tension between being and performing that Kurt Cobain—as sincere a voice as you'll find in pop—found especially tough to reconcile. It contributed to his feelings of self-alienation, his fears he'd sold out. The catch is that, in pop, being is performing. Realizing this can be liberating (I'm anyone I say I am!) or something like getting lost in a hall of mirrors. So there's a scary subtext to Beyoncé's patently unrevealing "revealing" new album—is it that she won't take off her mask or that, after so many years in the spotlight, she can't?