Entertainment

This New Clip Of Tween Beyoncé Performing Is Overwhelmingly ‘90s

by Emily Mae Czachor
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Thanks to London-based auction house Ted Owen & Co., Beyoncé fans now have the opportunity to peek into the early days of Queen Bey's career. The auction house is selling 19 videotapes touting two-and-a-half hours of unedited, never-before-seen footage of the pop superstar circa 1992, when she was just 10 years old. But it's one particular video of young Beyoncé singing with Girl's Tyme, the Houston-based girl group that got Bey her start, that's been drumming up the most buzz on social media.

One of Queen Bey's fan Twitter accounts (appropriately titled "Beyoncé Legion") tweeted the early '90s video clip Tuesday, Feb. 20, almost like a breaking news alert dispensed out to its robust social media following. The video, which spans the better part of a glorious two minutes, feels partly like an homage to early '90s hip-hop and partly like a tribute to Beyoncé's early-onset musical prowess. Because, judging by her performance in the video clip, the pop mogul has been delivering show-stopping performances since her elementary school days. (At least.) To preface the throwback video, the Twitter account also penned an accompanying caption, which reads, "More raw footage featuring Beyoncé and Girl's Tyme has been released from the original video tapes which are being auctioned until the 13th of March 2018."

Girl's Tyme, for the record, was sort of like the pre-teen antecedent to Destiny's Child. In addition to Beyoncé, the group included future Destiny's Child members Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Robertson, LeToya Luckett, as well as other members who didn't go on to be part of Destiny's Child.

Ted Owen & Co., the U.K. auctioneer currently sitting on more than two and a half hours of professionally-shot, raw footage chronicling Queen Bey's musical beginnings, first announced its Beyoncé-themed video auction back in 2016. At the time, the auction house's collection contained a sum total of 11 tapes, featuring previously unseen footage of 10-year-old Bey performing her heart out alongside her fellow Girl's Tyme crew. But, in 2018, the auction house has upped the number of tapes in its Beyoncé collection from 11 to 19, which alerted fans of the newly-minted existence of eight never-before-seen video clips of the pop music monarch, one of which was released and is the video in the tweet above. Ted Owen & Co. recently released a promotional video for its revamped Beyoncé Auction, which promises, "A substantial and now extended archive of original footage, including her 1st professional video recording."

As The Fader reported soon after the auction's original 2016 announcement, in addition to a stockpile of live performance clips, the video collection also contains behind-the-scenes footage of young Beyoncé rehearsing. And, according to Ted Owen & Co.'s updated description in 2018, the footage also contains tapes from Beyoncé's first two professionally-produced music videos, in addition to handful of "rehearsals, performances, and outtakes" from the earliest days of Bey's career.

While the auction house doesn't explicitly reveal the means through which it managed to acquire this limited stock of old-school Beyoncé gems, which it has appropriately dubbed "The Lost Beyoncé Collection," it does vaguely explain, "The collection has been locked in storage for more than twenty years and has only been seen by a select few people since being recorded." Bustle reached out to Ted Owen & Co. for future comment on how it obtained the videos and was told that the "the consigner of the tapes wishes to stay anonymous."

For anyone angling to snag a clip from the auction house's "Lost Beyoncé Collection," the timed auction is currently accepting bids, from now until March 13. The collection's eventual price tag is anyone's guess (or anyone's bid, rather). But if the 11 videotapes were reported to have been set for $3.8 million, it seems pretty safe to say that 19 will be no small fee.