Jay-Z’s Song For Blue Ivy Carter Is A Touching Tribute To New Parenthood With Beyonce

Just a few days after superstar Beyonce gave birth, rapper Jay-Z, her husband and child’s father, did what he does best: he went into the studio and wrote a beautiful song about his newborn daughter, Blue Ivy Carter. The song, “Glory,” is incredible, not only because of its revelations—their child was conceived in Paris, she is a miracle baby who came after the couple suffered a miscarriage—but because in it, Jay-Z pitches his bravado not about his previous dealings in the drug game or an expensive car or how hard he balls, but for the gift of his baby girl and the sheer joy of becoming a father. In “Glory’s” refrain, Jay-Z raps:

The most amazing feeling I feel
Words can’t describe what I’m feeling for real
Maybe I paint the sky blue
My greatest creation was you. You. Glory.

This is what I’ve always loved about him, you know. I’m a child of Hip Hop—spent my Friday nights in the basement of my childhood home filling cassette tapes with mixes by Mr. Magic and DJ Red Alert and analyzing word-for-word the lyrics of songs like “The Message” and the entirety of A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. I’m passionate about the art form. The stories. The artists’ ability to lay bare elements of their lives that make us think, look at things in a different way—make us smarter. Better. More. And no one does this more beautifully than Jay-Z, whose lyrics, save for the occasional song like “N*ggas in Paris,” really do put him well beyond the average rapper focused on money, hoes and clothes.

In “Glory,” Jay-Z uses personal, touching lyrics to tap into the sheer emotion that any of us parents can identify with: the ushering in of new life—the most precious of anything we could ever create, have for our own and love with great abandon. And while everyone else is focusing on where the baby was made and the couple’s miscarriage, Jay-Z is opening his heart and exposing the raw emotion behind his growing up fatherless and his conviction to never let his daughter suffer the same fate. This is a condition that our community specifically suffers greatly from, and the idea that this rapper would pen a song expressing his joy of being a daddy and his vow to do right by her sends a pretty powerful message to those who need it most.

Honestly, I haven’t heard anything like this from a male artist of his stature since Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely,” a song that, to this day, stays on my playlists (raise your hand if you substituted your child’s name for Aisha’s in the third verse!) and speaks to me in that black mama kinda way. That Jay-Z did the 2012 equivalent of one of my favorite Stevie songs makes me love him all the more.

This is what art is, isn’t it? A true artist isn’t afraid to take a slice of his own life and reinterpret and imagine it in a way that not only reveals a piece of himself, but taps into the emotions of his audience, who can see themselves in the reflection. Not only does “Glory” tell us something about Jay-Z and Beyonce, but it lays a blueprint for a generation of men starving for direction on how to express that joy—gives them the okay to say that they love and love strongly. That to do so is not unmanly. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. And it’s beautiful.

How special is it to consider the joy this child, Blue Ivy Carter, brings to Jay-Z and Beyonce. How special, too, to consider that two of the biggest stars in the world are enjoying exactly what each of us felt in the new moments of parenthood—that they, too, are human. Beautifully so.

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