Taking the stage four times in Madison Square Garden, enthralling the audience as she performed medleys of thirteen of her biggest hits, on the night that she received the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award for her body of work you might have presumed that the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards belonged to Rihanna. But inevitably you’d have been sorely mistaken, because Beyoncé was also on the performance list, and as always Queen Bey had her way.
Whether throwing out a few guttural syllables or letting loose with the full depth of her voice, grinding rhythmically or tossing together flurries of steps barely tethered to the choreography of her dancers, Rihanna is always invigorating and eloquent. But Beyoncé sure knows the meaning of hard work, and she gurned and grimaced as fierce as ever as she embarked on a sixteen-minute walking tour of the Manhattan arena at a brisk pace, singing rote relationship songs which the critics regard as resolutely gendered, before the epic spectacle drew to a close with ‘Formation’ as Beyoncé’s monolithic brand of female empowerment took familiar shape.
After a Busby Berkeley-inspired leg workout, Beyoncé’s troupe wound up collectively on their backs, forming the female sex symbol as if to re-emphasise the already explicit point. Rihanna might have a more intuitive feel for the music, but this is the sort of thing that really penetrates. Who needs art when the message is as powerful as this?
Beyoncé won eight awards at this year’s VMAs, taking her career total to twenty-four as she surpassed Madonna’s record of a measly twenty. The Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award purportedly received its title when the Thriller singer complained about Madonna receiving Artist of the Decade for the 1980s in a poll of MTV viewers. According to the popular biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, when the Vanguard Award was augmented with his name in front, the King of Pop remarked ‘That’ll sure teach that heifer’.
