Independent Women Part I

Destiny's Child recorded it for the soundtrack of the 2000 film Charlie's Angels, and it was later included on Survivor. The production duo Poke & Tone, made up of Samuel Barnes and Jean-Claude Olivier, wrote and produced it with Cory Rooney and Beyoncé. It began as a different track. An earlier version made by Keybeats, which samples Frank Comstock's Peabody's Improbable History, appears on Survivor as Independent Women Part II. Columbia was distributing the soundtrack, and the label wanted something more commercial, so the producers reworked the track and rewrote the lyrics to fit the film. That version came out first and was titled Part I. Rooney said the instrumental took 15 minutes to make in his studio on Long Island. The film's music supervisor, John Houlihan, noted that Beyoncé names the film's stars in the lyric and that the chorus asks how Charlie's Angels get down.

It was the first Destiny's Child single to feature Michelle Williams. In the United States it spent eleven consecutive weeks at number one on the Hot 100, and the Guinness book for 2000 to 2001 listed it as the longest-running number one by a female group. In Britain it entered at number one. It was nominated at the 2001 Grammys for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. Francis Lawrence directed the video, a Charlie's Angels boot camp with a voice for Charlie provided by John Forsythe. Alexis Petridis wrote that the song long outlived the film it soundtracked.