Jay-Z Hated That His Fame Made His Kids a Bigger Target: ‘Where’s the Humanity?’
Jay-Z is no stranger to celebrity feuds like his lengthy rivalry with Nas or his new spat with his former protégé Kanye West. But when he and his wife Beyoncé started having kids, he found that he even had to protect his children from the cutthroat entertainment industry. Despite his experience with feuds, going after kids was a new type of warfare for the Brooklyn emcee that he wasn’t completely prepared to deal with.
Jay-Z remembered growing up at a time when kids were off limits
Even before he became a celebrity, Jay-Z was focused on protecting and taking care of his family. In his childhood years, the “99 Problems” artist supported his family by selling drugs. It was a situation that many who grew up in his neighborhood knew all too well.
“Before, when our elders told us something, you had to listen. But now we were in power because the people who were supposed to be our support system were on crack, and they was telling us, ‘I’ll do anything to get it.’ So we were like elders in the village, with a whole community on drugs. There was no one to police us,” Jay-Z once said in an interview with The Guardian.
After his success in music, Jay-Z started a family of his own with Beyoncé. The Grammy-winner was able to provide for Blue Ivy in a much healthier way than he provided for his mom as a kid. Jay-Z and his wife spent a lot of money on their daughter before she was even born to ensure her comfortable lifestyle. But the business mogul knew that all the money in the world wouldn’t necessarily guarantee his daughter’s safety at all times. Life was unpredictable, and Jay-Z had to be willing to go to great lengths to protect his family from the unexpected. Stepping out of his comfort zone, he even learned how to swim just for Blue Ivy’s sake.
“It’s amazing. It’s a very grounding thing. I didn’t learn how to swim until Blue was born,” he once told the former HBO show The Shop: Uninterrupted. “There goes everything you need to know. This is a metaphor for our relationship. If she ever fell in the water and I couldn’t get her, I couldn’t even fathom that thought. I gotta learn how to swim. That’s it. That was the beginning of our relationship.”
However, Jay-Z quickly found other ways that his family and daughter could be taken advantage of. Much like the Carter’s other children, Blue Ivy’s name has a special meaning behind it. But to companies and opportunists, her name meant more money, which they tried to profit off of. Jay-Z asserted that he hadn’t even seen anyone in his drug dealing days stoop so low for cash.
“People wanted to make products based on our child’s name, and you don’t want anybody trying to benefit off your baby’s name. It wasn’t for us to do anything; as you see, we haven’t done anything,” he said in a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair. “First of all, it’s a child, and it bothers me when there’s no [boundaries]. I come from the streets, and even in the most atrocious shit we were doing, we had lines: no kids, no mothers— there was respect there. But [now] there’s no boundaries. For somebody to say, This person had a kid—I’m gonna make a f***in’ stroller with that kid’s name. It’s, like, where’s the humanity?”
Jay-Z and Beyoncé had to fight to protect Blue Ivy’s name
Jay-Z’s comments about protecting Blue Ivy were ironically used against him when he and Beyoncé tried trademarking their daughter’s name. Wedding planner Veronica Morales founded her company Blue Ivy events in 2009. So to save her business, she opposed Jay-Z’s and Beyoncé’s trademark attempts, and initially won the case against them.
“Money doesn’t buy everything,” Morales once told Rolling Stone in her victory speech.
“If this [hadn’t worked], I’d go after both of them,” she added. “There’s no way by way of being a celebrity they should have entitlement [to the name]. Shame on them.”
However, it seems that Morales’s victory was short-lived. In 2020, Law & Crime reported that Beyoncé won the intellectual property rights for her daughter’s name. According to documents, Morales argued that if the Carters trademarked Blue Ivy, it would cause too much confusion among potential customers. But Beyoncé’s counterargument was that very few people would’ve confused Morales’s organization with the daughter of two famous celebrities. The outcome showed that the courts eventually agreed with the Carter family.
