Beyoncé Giselle Knowles makes for a very twenty-first-century superstar. A singer, an actress and the face of colossal advertising campaigns (Pepsi, L’Oréal), she is a woman tailor-made to appeal to almost everyone, her eye forever on the target demographics. Proof? As the frontwoman (and main songwriter) for Destiny’s Child, she is an empowering totem for independent women the world over, while her male fans appreciate her fondness for bikinis. Her audience is young, mass and enormously suburban.

Thus, to maintain her street credibility, she recently duetted with former drug dealer Jay-Z on the single “ ’03 Bonnie & Clyde”; she has recorded a version of 50 Cent’s “In da Club”; and she encourages bedroom DJs such as Freelance Hellraiser to feed her vocals through a mixer on bootleg mash-ups.

“Beyoncé is perfect,” says the London-based Freelance Hellraiser (his real name is Roy; he declines to give his last name). “She’s got balls and a voice that is really beautiful but really tough as well. Unlike some other R&B singers, she doesn’t use her vocal gymnastics to overpower the song. I laid [Destiny Child’s] ‘Jumpin’ Jumpin’ ’ over an old MC5 track, and it worked perfectly, because she is total quality. She crosses barriers, doesn’t she? Pop, R&B, everything.”

Her efforts to appeal to everyone don’t always work. Destiny’s Child were famously booed a couple of years ago at a concert organized by New York hip-hop powerhouse radio station Hot 97, presumably because they weren’t urban enough. And when Beyoncé played the 2001 inauguration of fellow Texan George W. Bush, hollering from the stage, “I wanna hear you say Bush!”, she didn’t exactly bolster her ghetto cred.

But Beyoncé’s version of the American dream, passed down and scrupulously supervised by her well-to-do parents, has no patience for such fusty obstacles as race or politics. A good, God-fearing girl, Beyoncé was brought up to believe that she was blessed with certain gifts and that if she worked her brains out, she’d achieve everything that she wanted. The pigment of her skin was neither here nor there. Forget comparisons to other singers; it’s athletes-turned-megabrands like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods whom Beyoncé most resembles. Because in twenty-first-century America, green is the one color that matters most.

To learn how Beyoncé feels about being branded a “diva” and how she responds to all those Jay-Z rumors, pick up the August issue of Blender, on newsstands now.