JAY-Z has finally revealed the origins of his oldest daughter Blue Ivy’s name — and also shared that she was originally going to be called something else.
Hov sat down for a two-part interview with Gayle King on CBS Mornings, and during the second part of the interview, which aired on Friday (October 27), he told the longtime journalist that “Blue Ivy” wasn’t the original name that he and his wife Beyoncé were going to go with.
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“She was meant to be Brooklyn,” he said to King. The name was presumably intended as a tribute to the New York borough where JAY-Z was born. “That was the name we had in theory. But when we got the sonograms, you know, [the fetus] is super small, and we was calling her a blueberry. Like, ‘Look at the little blueberry!’ It was like a nickname. For nine months we were like, ‘Look at the little blueberry.’ So it was just natural, we just took the ‘berry’ off and called her Blue.”
Check out the interview with CBS Mornings below. The section about Blue Ivy begins at the 7:20 mark.
Throughout JAY-Z’s interview with Gayle King, he spoke frequently — and highly — about Blue Ivy Carter, although the father of three also revealed that, like every other pre-teen, Blue had her moments where she was “fronting” on her father.
Jay laughed as he described his eldest daughter’s initial resistance to his coolness, but explained that she’s since come around.
“Blue – she be fronting on me a little bit, but I catch her in the corner,” Hov said. “Now she asks me if this is cool — her sneakers or whatever she’s wearing. She’s come back, but there was a time where she was like, ‘Daaaad!’ I was like, ‘I’m cool. I don’t what you saying! At your house, your parents is cool!”
Elsewhere in the interview, JAY-Z broke down how he got the nickname ‘One Take Hov’ in the early days of his career.
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“This was when you were recording to actual tape,” he explained. “So you can’t mess up because then you gotta go all the way back and you gotta cut the tape. That’s where the whole ‘One Take Hov’ came from, because if you wanted to fly the chorus on this thing [copy the chorus on one part of the song to a different part], you had to go to dinner. It took an engineer hours.”
He continued: “He had to cut the tape, fly it over here. So I started learning my lyrics really good so I could do them one time, you understand? Straight down and I didn’t waste time.”
