Destiny's Child: Survivor (Columbia)

POP HISTORY IS as slippery as a Tom Parker, as mysterious as a Brian Epstein, as mercurial as a Malcolm McLaren. Like its great managerial movers and shakers, the tale we try to tell about the development of the music, is desperately hard to pin down. It is a story skewed by lies, damned lies and histrionics, a saga in which commerce has generally victored over artistic purity, whites have had the upperhand at the expense of blacks, and men have all too often marginalised women to be the point of near invisibility.