Beyoncé – Work It Out

“Crazy in Love” wasn’t her first solo single. This was, and it missed the Hot 100.

On the first day of rehearsals she was learning a trick with the microphone — the kind of thing that looks effortless on a stage and is not — and the mic came up too fast and caught her in the mouth. She chipped a tooth. Somebody drove her to a cosmetic dentist to get it repaired before filming, and then she went back and finished learning the trick. Beyoncé was twenty years old, still in Destiny’s Child, and about to release the first record with only her name on it.

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Columbia released Work It Out on June 11, 2002, as the lead single from the soundtrack to Austin Powers in Goldmember, in which she played Foxxy Cleopatra opposite Mike Myers. She wrote it with Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, who produced it as the Neptunes, and they cut it in March 2002 at the Record Plant in Los Angeles and Sunrise Studios in Houston. It runs 4:06 and it is a funk record — horns, a bassline doing most of the talking, nothing about it resembling what Destiny’s Child had been selling. That was the entire point.

The film gave her the excuse. Foxxy Cleopatra was a broad send-up of the blaxploitation heroines of the early seventies, Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones, and playing her let Beyoncé try on a version of herself that was funnier and more physical than anything Destiny’s Child allowed. It was only her second acting job; the first had been the title role in the MTV film Carmen: A Hip Hopera the year before. The Austin Powers franchise, as its music supervisor put it, was relentless about wanting singles and videos out of every film, and the same soundtrack carried Britney Spears’s Boys, also written and produced by the Neptunes, also with Myers in the video. Two of the biggest pop careers of the decade were being launched off the same comedy sequel by the same two producers.

A television show that never existed

Matthew Rolston directed the video in New York in early June 2002, and MTV premiered it on June 17. Rolston built the whole thing to look like archive footage from a variety programme somewhere between Sonny & Cher and The Midnight Special — the narrow window after the hippies and before disco, when television still put a band in a room and pointed cameras at them. Beyoncé wanted it raw, and said she was after the look of an old seventies show. It opens with her, in character, sitting in a movie theater beside Austin Powers, which ties the video back to the closing scene of the film it was selling.

And then nothing happened

It missed the Billboard Hot 100 completely. Not a low placing — an absence. It entered the Hot Dance Club Play chart at forty-nine and worked its way to eleven, and that was the extent of it in America. The plan had been for Work It Out to lead her debut album into the world. The plan changed. Columbia and her team pulled it, held the album, and when Dangerously in Love arrived in 2003 the lead single was Crazy in Love, which went to number one in America and Britain and became one of the defining records of the decade. Work It Out turned up as a bonus track on the non-American editions, tucked at the back.

Which is why almost nobody has this right. Ask most people what Beyoncé’s first solo single was and they will say Crazy in Love, because that is where the story is usually told from. It was not the debut. It was the recovery. The actual debut is a funk song from a comedy soundtrack that got a Black Reel nomination and no chart position worth printing, and the twenty-year-old who made it had to absorb a public failure at the exact moment she was proving she could work without the group.

She turns forty-five on September 4, 2026, with a career that has since made the 2002 miss look like a rounding error. It is worth remembering that it did not look like one at the time. The interesting thing about Work It Out is not that it failed. It is that she made a record aimed squarely at 1973, watched it land on nobody, and did not conclude that the instinct was wrong — she just waited, and used it again later, and by then everybody was ready.