Hip-hop star Jay-Z has apparently vowed to stop using the word “bitch” in his lyrics now that his wife and fellow superstar Beyoncé has given birth to a daughter, Blue Ivy.

He was reported to have made this pledge in a poem, one verse of which reads: “Before I got in the game, made a change and got rich / I didn’t think 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 / No man will degrade her and call her names.”

Well, good. It may not be up to the mark of TS Eliot, but it gets the point across well enough.

I find it odd, though, that Jay-Z would have to wait until the birth of a daughter before the blinding realisation that misogyny isn’t very nice.

Why, I wonder, did he not experience this Damascene conversion on his marriage to Beyoncé? Was it okay to “degrade” her?

And why did she never have a word with him about it?

She should have made more of an effort over the breakfast table to get such epithets dropped long ago.

Still, we’re getting there. We can only hope that more of the hip-hop musicians who rely on such language in their lyrics also have daughters, gaze upon them and suddenly see the light.

Family life has unexpected bonuses. – The Independent