Former New York Mayor slams Beyonce’s VMAs performance

Beyonce’s epic MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) performance has angered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy, who was in office at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the city, was offended by what he believed was the Formation singer’s 15 minute set’s anti-police theme.
During Sunday’s (28Aug16) VMAs, which was held in the Big Apple, Beyonce performed a medley of songs from her acclaimed Lemonade album, closing with her black feminist anthem Formation.
Her set included a segment which featured her backup dancers falling to the ground one at a time under a pool of red light, symbolising the death of black men and women at the hands of the police.
Giuliani was angered by the performance, saying he had done more to save the lives of young African-Americans by putting into place hardline policing policies.
“I saved more black lives than any of those people you saw on stage by reducing crime, and particularly homicide, by 75 percent – of which maybe 4,000 or 5,000 were African-American young people, who are all alive today because of the policies I put in effect that weren’t in effect for 35 years,” Giuliani told U.S. news show Fox & Friends.
Referring to Beyonce’s decision to depict the deaths in dance, the ex-politician angrily continued, “If you’re going to do that, then you also should symbolise why the police officers are in those neighbourhoods, and what are you going to do about that? What are you doing about it?”
It is not the first time the former Mayor has criticised Beyonce for incorporating nods to African-American protest movements; in February (16) he slammed her Super Bowl halftime show performance containing similar imagery.
In addition to the political imagery in her VMAs stage performance, Beyonce also appeared on the red carpet with the mothers of three African-American men killed by police, and the mother of Trayvon Martin, who was shot by neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in 2012.