What do you guys think of Jay-Z's recent announcement?
Jay-Z has vowed to never use derogatory terms for women in his music again following the birth of his daughter, Blue Ivy Carter.
The rapper, who welcomed his first child with wife Beyoncé last weekend, has stated in a poem to celebrate the birth of baby Blue Ivy that he will drop the use of 'b*tch' - revealing that his degradation of women in his songs "has passed."
"Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich/ I didn't think hard about using the word b*tch/ I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it/ Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it. I never realized while on the fast track that I’d give riddance to the word bitch, to leave her innocence in tact."
The hip-hop icon continued:
"No man will degrade her, or call her name. I'm so focused on your future, the degradation has passed. I wish you wealth, health and insight. Forever young you may pass. Blue Ivy Carter, my angel."
I personally think of this as a start, but only that. He still has a lot of work to do. We see this with men a lot. They have a daughter and all of a sudden they don't like to see women degraded. There are two problems I see with this immediately.
One: Didn't his wife count as a woman who shouldn't be degraded? Or wasn't she "innocent" enough? He seemed to think it was all right for "non-innocent" women to be degraded.
And OK fine, it is good that he can see it from a different perspective now that he has a daughter and maybe he will extend this feeling to all women. I hope so. I hope he can continue to learn.
But the second problem is that it is still about HIM. It took him personally experiencing the feeling of "this is too close to me now and I don't want it to happen" in order for him to change.
Or as another anonymous commenter said on this blog,
I don't understand, Why does something dramatic have to happen in someone's life before they decide "Oh, yeah I gotta stop being this way because I don't want some one to mess with mine in the future."
Men should respect women not because the disrespect upsets men, but because it oppresses women. At least that is what I believe in cases like that.
However I still want to say that it is a good start and in my own opinion, if he continues to learn more about oppression and misogyny, then maybe he will come to realize this. I have hope.
We didn't hear a word like this from Gerard Way, Lindsey Way, or Frank Iero when they had daughters. Not one of them came forward and said "I never thought about how women were treated until I had a daughter, now I think I'll stop degrading them." So also in my opinion, Jay-Z is way ahead of them. MSI and MCR are still in the dark ages.
Also, I wish all of you a happy and healthy new year and the best of luck in 2012.
