B’DAY (20th ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

The weirdest song in the entire Beyoncé catalog might just be “Daddy,” the tender finale to her massive 2003 debut album, Dangerously in Love. Originally a hidden track, for good reason, the hook of the piano ballad goes like this: “I want my unborn son to be like my daddy/I want my husband to be like my daddy.” Yeah, the Knowles fam was tripping. The “Daddy” lyrics might give you the heebie jeebies, but the real problem is that, over 20 years later, I still can’t tell if it was a song Beyoncé actually wanted to make or one she felt she had to. I know, I know, Dangerously in Love has got a few heaters on there—the go-go bounce of “Crazy in Love” and the flirtatious dancehall duet “Baby Boy” with Sean Paul, both No. 1 hits, immediately come to mind—but for an album she had been waiting all of her life to make, it’s full of artistic compromise.

For as long as Beyoncé has been in the spotlight, the media has been trying to psychoanalyze her relationship with her pops, Mathew Knowles. Before his life goal was to turn Beyoncé into a massive pop sensation, he was purportedly the number-one sales rep in the medical division of Xerox. He brought that acumen into the management of his daughter’s career. As the business man behind Destiny’s Child throughout their lifespan—from a teenage foursome dropping wise-beyond-their-years female empowerment anthems to the trio that has become canon (Bey, Kelly, Michelle)—his old-school helicopter parent tendencies have been heavily documented: making them practice singing while jogging and rewatching tapes of the pop stars before them like a quarterback with Heisman Trophy dreams. His meddling and favoritism has also long been rumored to be the reason for the group’s musical chairs around 1999’s The Writing’s on the Wall, the album that stamped them as one of the great R&B groups of their era.

You’ll never find it said explicitly, given how Beyoncé has been media-trained since elementary school, but it was apparent that there was immense pressure on her not just to become a star, but to do so on her dad’s terms. There are hints in a 2004 Rolling Stone profile that zooms in on how much work he put into the development of the Beyoncé brand, as he drops manipulative comments that could be interpreted as an attempt to keep her in check: “Beyoncé’s not as beautiful as her mama,” goes one. A couple years earlier, speaking to Vibe, Beyoncé said, “I’ve always been the type of person who cares so much about what everybody thinks, to the point where it was kind of sick.”

To snap out of that, to truly do a solo album her way, she had to sneak away from the nest and find her own little obsessions. In the musical movies Beyoncé grew up loving—Sparkle, Lady Sings the Blues—there’d typically be a scene just like this: one where the shy yet crazy talented young singer gets loose from the money-hungry grip of show business and fulfills their pop diva destiny. For Beyoncé, B’Day is that moment. Dropped on her 25th birthday in 2006 and now commemorated with a 20th-anniversary reissue that is in part a celebration of this breakthrough in agency and in part a money-grab featuring unreleased tracks and pointless Spanish-language remixes that could’ve stayed in the vault, it is just about the closest you’ll get to knowing a pre-“Single Ladies” Beyoncé.

B’Day was made in a way she had never made music before. On her own, she booked up three rooms in the old Sony Studios in Hell’s Kitchen for weeks and invited a bunch of beatmakers and songwriters from her recent past to join her on a creative binge with a competitive spirit. (A far cry from the process of making Dangerously in Love, which began with a series of producer interviews, almost like she was recruiting MIT grads to be software engineers at her start-up.) In the mix for B’Day were LaShawn Daniels cooking up with Rodney Jerkins and Rich Harrison. Sean Garrett locked in with Swizz Beatz. Angie Beyincé and Solange mulling around. Jigga and Pharrell like ghosts whispering through the walls. Beyoncé pulled the strings and came away with a record loaded with ultra-detailed club-pop bangers that felt like a pure reflection of everything she truly fucked with. Her dad ain’t get the memo until later.

Beyoncé might’ve been a Houston girl, but the guiding obsession of B’Day is that New York swag. She was drawn to the rhythms and the language of the Northeast. “We like them boys up top from the B.K./Know how to flip that money three ways/Always ridin’ big on the freeway/With that East Coast slang that us country girls, we like,” she sang in a full-on swoon on Destiny’s Child’s complicated 2004 smash “Solider.” Though B’Day was made in a jiffy, you can tell that she had spent years immersed in the production intricacies of East Coast club rap: the hard-ass hi-hats of Ez Elpee-produced jams like Shyne’s “Bad Boyz” and G. Dep’s “Special Delivery”; Neptunes-produced Harlem shake classics such as Fabolous’ “Young’n” and N.O.R.E.’s “Nothin”; and the pre-get lite clap beats Just Blaze was hooking up the Roc-a-Fella boys with (you know, Beanie Sigel’s “Roc the Mic” and Freeway’s “Flipside”) under the watch of her boyfriend, Jay-Z.

Key in weaving that New York bounce into her maximalist pop-R&B framework was the similarly big picture-minded Swizz Beatz. The first song they dropped together was “Check On It,” featuring molasses-tongued Houston rapper Slim Thug, which was originally intended to be nothing more than the theme song to 2006’s The Pink Panther movie, co-starring Beyoncé, until it went to No. 1 on the charts. Ah, the days when Slim Thug could casually nab the opening verse on the biggest hit in the country. It’s a cool song with an unusually restrained B. vocal performance that has an almost Amerie-ish girl-next-door smoothness and a slight touch of Swizz zaniness in the form of the claps and whistles. On this reissue, it sticks out because of how much bigger and better all of their other collabs are, even without the same level of chart success.

I mean, c’mon, you’ve got the raging “Ring the Alarm,” with its carnival-ready airhorns and frenetic claps, where Beyoncé is sending warning shots to her man in a controlled shout-sing. Her voice goes to about five different levels of pissed off in three and a half minutes, from the megaphone-filtered threats in the first few seconds to the mix of gut-punched hurt and disbelief in the light delivery of “How could you look at me and not see all the things?” It’s the perfect evolution of peak Destiny’s Child man fatigue. A little sillier is “Upgrade U,” featuring Jay-Z and produced by Bey, Swizz, and Cam Wallace, which adopts a dance-battle tempo as Beyoncé slides in and out of belting and rapping better than just about anyone ever has. Hov’s verse is kind of nonsense, but it’s funny to think of the song as all about her getting him to wear more neckties and develop a skincare routine.

None of them are touching “Get Me Bodied,” a Beyoncé all-timer. “The idea of ‘getting me bodied’ was basically Beyoncé loving New York guys,” Sean Garrett said in an interview about writing this track. “In New York, they say, ‘Imma body this nigga when I see him,’ and this was the flip of that.” You can sense that energy on the sexed-up hook, where she sounds so loose while keeping that Aretha-raised soul intact. Swizz, fresh off yelling all over singles like Remy Ma’s “Whuteva,” is more in DJ Webstar hypeman mode, which gives the track an almost mix-CD vibe. I have a feeling Beyoncé is similarly high on “Get Me Bodied,” given that there are three different Spanish remixes on the reissue. Too bad all of them stink, because her interest in Latin music seems to be a lot more surface level—very ’90s-sounding reggaeton dependent on familiar samples—than her plunge into East Coast street shit. At least she didn’t include the English version of “Move Your Body,” the 2011 edit of “Get Me Bodied” produced for a Michelle Obama childhood obesity campaign.

That’s the tension at play on this reissue: the burning hunger of 25-year-old Beyoncé’s mission to leave her mark and the necessity of 45-year-old Beyoncé having something new to sell. It’s nowhere near an offensive butchering, but it is a little cold to treat one of her most inspired albums like just another product to bundle with a new merch collection—including a $948.01 (before shipping) “Bey Keeper’s Collector Box” that is “inspired by the beauty of traditional beekeeper crates” to hold your Beyoncé vinyl—vinyl sold separately.

Well, good thing the songs still hit. “Deja Vu” whips ass: the live horns, the Off the Wall-style bent to her impassioned grunt-wails, Jay proving himself to be the last mainstream rapper with serious baseball references. The Rich Harrison go-go band feel of “Freakum Dress” might just sound like “Crazy in Love” again, but I like the club play-by-play in the verses more. “Kitty Kat,” produced by the Neptunes at their airiest, is some of her tightest writing to this day. It’s as if she’s sealing a goodbye letter to an ungrateful man with a lipsticked kiss, as if this is the relationship from which she must regretfully move on to fulfill her purpose.

There is an old Neptunes cut (“My First Time”) and a couple of P-assisted throwaways (“Morning Dew (Donk)” and “Can I Watch You”) on here, too; hard to complain about that, but none of them are as heartfelt as “Kitty Kat.” If there is a compromise on the original B’Day, it is the Ne-Yo penned “Irreplaceable,” with its Nashville-influenced structure and straightforward vocal balladry. Of course, this song became the hit and is still one of the biggest singles she’s ever put out. Corny but I get it—that “to the left, to the left” refrain is still catchy as hell. The drums are also harder than they have any right to be, which sort of feels more like a personal touch than any of the lyrics. The better ballad is “Flaws and All,” because it seems like a nod to all of the insecurities she had to overcome, the walls she had to bring down, to be able to make B’Day.

Years later there’d be more relationship-specific and revealing Beyoncé music, but that came once the music world was all-in on Bey fever, when, in the eyes of many, she could do no wrong. B’Day is riskier, rawer. It’s her chips-all-in album. She didn’t just run back the hit-chasing of Dangerously in Love, or wait for her dad to lay out the master plan. “When I was young, my ambition was to get a recording deal and get a gold record and write a number one single,” she said in 2003. “That was the only thing I wanted.” B’Day is after more than that: It’s her.

Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.