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LA Times: Amateurs opened for Bey at VMAs
MTV Video Music Awards 2014: Beyoncé shows the stars how it's done
Flawless? That's one way to describe Beyonce's show-closing performance on the #VMAs.
Who booked all the amateur acts to open for Beyoncé?
Amateurs, anyway, is what Beyoncé made a room full of stars look like when she closed the MTV Video Music Awards, broadcast live Sunday night from the Forum in Inglewood. Onstage for nearly 20 minutes, the singer moved inexorably through an ambitious, complicated performance that touched on most of her self-titled album from last year. When it was over, her husband, Jay Z -- the guilty party in a never-ending stream of tabloid reports about the unraveling of their marriage -- brought their 2-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, to her, for a warm family hug. He brought a trophy, as well: the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, presented to Beyoncé in recognition of her impact on the form.
Finally, there was the name of an artist she might've recognized from her own league.
Yet even that surprising move had only a fraction of the gravitas that Beyoncé brought to her grand finale. A sort of rapid-fire digest of her portion of the shared stadium tour she's on with Jay Z, the performance pulled from all manner of sounds and styles, juxtaposing harsh electronic beats and rubbery neo-soul bass, staccato hip-hop rhythms and sweeping vocal melodies. It had dancing that was equally expansive, with severe head-snapping choreography giving way to the singer's writhing on a pole. And then there was Beyoncé's bedazzled leotard, a costume at once flashier and more refined than anybody else's on Sunday.
The show business was, as one of her songs put it, flawless. But what really set her apart was the lifelike range of feeling she was using all that technique to put across. A lover's sexual hunger, a mother's tender devotion, a feminist's impatience with small minds -- Beyoncé embodied them all in a way that made the rest of the VMAs feel brittle and one-dimensional.
Read Full Article: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...825-story.html
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