I was all set to write about Beyonce Knowles for the Scene this week only to have the assignment snatched from under me. Well, that gives me room to expand my thoughts.

Beyonce’s handlers are master star makers. It appears her father’s influence seems to have waned in recent years, so I don’t know who is to blame, whether producer David Foster or an army of highly paid Hollywood automatrons. Still, they’ve managed to turn a moderately talented R&B singer into an all-entertainment diva of Diana Ross proportions. She’s got this schizophrenic mega personality going, hip-hop hag, polished Hollywood star, and staid, virtuous role model all at once.

If you’re of the opinion that she’s totally unique and unlike anyone else before, you’d be mistaken. When I see her in videos rolling around on the floor in a mini-dress and heels, slightly zaftig, I’m put in the mind of the starlets that used to make appearances on The Tonight Show when I was a lad. There was Lola Falana and Joey Heatherton, two actress/singers/dancers who made careers out of appearing with Carson and hoofing it in Las Vegas, and whose names were made the butt of a joke for the SCTV comedy show. There was Ann Margret, who turned out to be quite an actor, was probably best known for her physicality (during the time of her music career, she wanted to be known as the female Elvis).

Obviously Beyonce has eclipsed these women in nearly all endeavors. Still, there’s something about Ms Knowles that’s a throwback to these women, who were working when cats were still hanging out at the Playboy club. Sex sells, okay. I don’t have a huge problem with her using her physicality to make the cash registers sing. I don’t have that much a problem with the apparent contradictions between her pronouncements of independence and modesty and her slithering around like a washed up Vegas showgirl. Perhaps that’s the key phrase here, “washed up.” She isn’t, of course, and still has a chance to become either a fine actress or a singer of some worth (if not ability – and her penchant for screaming lyrics isn’t going to help her longevity). There’s a certain desperation in her flaunting that’s off putting. Perhaps the barrel rolls are a function of a bad choreographer. It’s just that she doesn’t really need all that considering her physical assets are hard to ignore. Does she need the pole routine? One would think that instead of a billion seller, she’s a little known starlet trying to make a name for herself by cooing at a chat show host.

Good to see, however, that she doesn’t take it all too seriously, as evinced by the goofiness in the video for “Get Me Bodied.” Though there isn’t so much an idea that she’s self-aware enough to make it a parody of that starlet part of her image, she isn’t afraid to look silly on screen (perhaps because her popularity is so great that for many she can do no wrong).

I’m not a fan of her style of urban pop, though I have to respect the balls out play for radio airtime she and her producers cooked up. A song with three hooks that feeds off three separate pop music lyrical standards (“Irreplaceable”)? That’s basically a license to print money. It’s also shameless, when you think about. Perhaps that’s the key, shameless.