Jay-Z watches the action during the Kentucky Wildcats game against the Louisville Cardinals at Rupp Arena on Dec. 31, 2011 in Lexington, Kentucky
*Time Magazine has weighed in on the decision by Jay-Z to remove the B-word from his lyrics, now that he has a daughter. Journalist Claire Suddath actually counts how many times the term appears in the rapper’s lyrics:
She writes in her Jan. 18 article:
Jay-Z has only been a father for a week and already he’s feeling protective of his child. The rapper has reportedly written a poem about his newborn daughter Blue Ivy Carter, in which he laments the derogatory term “bitch” and vows to strike it from his vocabulary.
According to NME, this is an excerpt from Jay-Z’s poem:
Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich
I didn’t think hard about using the word bitch
I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it
Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it
Hova has yet to confirm or deny that the poem is his, so who knows if the hip-hop mogul will really de-bitch his discography. Some of Jay-Z’s biggest hits — from “Big Pimpin’” to “99 Problems” — make use of the word. He has a song called “Bitches and Sisters” on The Blueprint II: The Gift and the Curse and his Watch the Throne collaboration with Kanye West contains a track called “That’s My Bitch,” on which Jay-Z talks affectionately about his wife, Beyoncé (and then immediately refers to her as his bitch). Just how many of Jay-Z’s songs contain the word, anyway? We decided to count.
Some TIME writers and I combed through the lyrics to Jay-Z’s 15 studio albums (both solo and collaborative) and this is what we’ve found: 109 out of 217 songs contain the word “Bitch.” That’s 50.2% of Jay-Z’s entire lyrical output. Hova’s bitchiest album appears to be 1998’s Vol 2…Hard Knock Life, on which 71% of the songs feature the newly illicit B-word. On the song “Paper Chase,” he even took the women-as-dogs metaphor a step further with the line “Greyhound bitch, stay down bitch.”
There are, of course, countless ways the word can be used, and to varying degrees of offensiveness. To simplify things, all uses of “bitch” were treated equally in our lyrical survey. For example, Jay-Z’s 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt included commonplace phrases such as “Life’s a bitch” and others as rude as “If your leg’s broke bitch, hop on your good foot.”
While I appreciate Jay-Z’s newfound feminism (if it is indeed true), I don’t know how he’s going to avoid using the word if he wants to keep performing his old material. He could just bleep it out, I guess, but that’s not very helpful; we’d still know what he meant. No, Jay-Z will have to find an apt replacement to fit every lyric. That must be the 100th problem he’s been trying to avoid.
hip hop, the nations dumbest musical “art form”
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I co-sign. Now, if this simpleton could just do something about the “N*****” word. He totally ruined the lyrics of “Empire State of Mind” with that mess.
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I wanna co-sign too. Not with the simpleton part, but about the N***** word. I wish all of the rappers/musicians, old and new school would stop using that “ignorant” word….It’s ignorant no matter how you spell or pronounce it!
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ditto
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Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon with opinions now that new papa Jay will eliminate the b-word in his future rap lyrics.
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Was there any doubt that Shawn has used the word b8tch many many many times over? So have most rappers and like w/Shawn, it has always added very little of substance to his tracks.
I think he would have served himself better by not announcing the nonuse altogether and allow the rest of us to figure it out. It ain’t like it woulda been hard to do.
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I agree…all the hoopla is just unneccessary. Would have been better off by just playing it by ear. They are going too overboard with this.
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question now is, which one of these no-talent bottom feeding so called rappers will be the first to eat its own with regards to blasting “hova” (or whatever the he11 he is calling himself these days, i suspect a name change is coming soon) over not using the b-word anymore, calling him a hypocrite and softee to get their own weight up in the game. sigh.
and the beat dont stop until the break of dawn….or at least until a hip hop “artist” has a child…sigh again.
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I think it’s a good move, but why announce it. We know you have a daughter, thanks for bringing it up again. I know Bey is now no longer black but multiracial, as most of us actually are, but Jay your daughter is black. I had this discussion with a friend a few years back who seemed to think saying b***h was offensive but the N isn’t. So, why does Jay not think his little princess isn’t going to feel disrespected by that also? And isn’t his other child black, so why not think about the implications of the “n” word on him. I mean, I’m not knocking his decision, but if you are trying to be sensitive and respectful…why not be entirely so.
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