Happy 14th Birthday, Blue Ivy! Here Are Her 7 Best Music Moments

Not many people can say they’ve washed Jay-Z on a track, but Blue Ivy is one of those lucky folks!

When Blue Ivy spat, “never seen a ceiling in my whole life” (at just four years old, mind you!), Hov stood no chance of going toe to toe with his baby girl. Produced by No I.D., the track appears as the penultimate track on an expanded edition of Jay’s 2017 4:44 LP. The song has remained a fixture for the Carters and their fans alike in the eight years since, with Beyoncé interpolating Blue’s lyrics during one Renaissance World Tour stop.

When “Brown Skin Girl,” a gorgeous ode to darker-hued ladies, dropped alongside Beyoncé’s highly underrated The Lion King: The Gift compilation soundtrack, the entire moment felt like the culmination of a chapter that began with Blue Ivy’s cameo in the 2016 “Formation” music video.

In that music video, Blue stared down the camera with pride as the lyrics, “I’m a star,” blared in the background — a not-so-subtle rebuttal to the grown adults who relentlessly mocked a child’s Black features. Three years later, “Brown Skin Girl” found Blue leveling up, as she harmonized the intro with her mother and appeared alongside Kelly Rowland, Naomi Campbell, Lupita Nyong’o and grandmother Tina Knowles in the accompanying music video.

In a Won of One: A PLLRS Podcast interview, industry veteran Steven “Steve-O” Carless, who served as an A&R exec for The Gift, revealed Blue Ivy was the person who swayed Beyoncé to cut “Brown Skin Girl.” “She starts singing the hook… Beyoncé turns and says, ‘Play it again,’” he recounted. “We end up listening for 15 minutes. Then she’s like, ‘Alright, I like it. I’ll take it. It’s the single.’”

Considering “Brown Skin Girl” earned the mother-daughter duo trophies from the Grammys, MTV Video Music Awards, Soul Train Awards, BET Awards, NAACP Image Awards and a Gold Cannes Lion for excellence in music video… looks like Blue Ivy was right!

Blue Ivy may not have appeared onstage during Beyoncé’s legendary 2018 Coachella headlining set, but she did appear in the following year’s Homecoming, a documentary recounting the journey to the culture-shifting show. In that doc, Blue can be seen intently studying her mother as they grind through months of rehearsals. In one scene, which later became a track on the film’s accompanying live album, Blue sings a sweet cover of the Black National Anthem: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

It’s an equally adorable and poignant moment. You can’t help but smile when Beyoncé whispers forgotten lyrics into her baby girl’s ears, and the sight of a Black mother passing on this sacred anthem to her Black daughter is enough to get the waterworks starting.

Midway through the European leg of her Renaissance World Tour, Queen Bey trotted out a special guest who would soon become something of a mainstay in her live performances: Miss Blue Ivy Carter.

Carter made her tour debut at the May 26 Stade de France show in Paris, dancing to “My Power,” an anthemic cut from The Gift. By the end of the tour, Blue was dancing alongside professionals to both “My Power” and “Black Parade,” with her mother pouring into her at each show as she performed to sold-out stadiums as a pre-teen. After seeing her cut up in Homecoming, this really should have been less of a surprise!

Nonetheless, the Renaissance World Tour marked a very important step in Blue Ivy’s stage evolution.

Everyone knows “Diva” is an iconic song. Beyoncé’s spunky 2009 single reached the Hot 100’s top 20 and has been a mainstay in her setlists ever since…. until the Renaissance World Tour. Almost.

In Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé, a documentary chronicling the ideation and execution of the tour, Blue Ivy can be seen sitting in on a team meeting as Beyoncé & Co. whittle down the setlist. The decision-makers in the room are contemplating scrapping “Diva,” but Blue passionately interjects, “No! Please! Please! You can’t do that!”

After gently disciplining her daughter about how to properly enter conversations, Beyoncé eventually acquiesced, allowing “Diva” to remain on the Renaissance World Tour setlist — and spin out this viral moment.

Beyoncé is currently rolling out a trilogy project, so, naturally, Blue Ivy was involved with the second installment: 2024’s Cowboy Carter. The history-making, country-infused Cowboy Carter finally won Beyoncé her long-awaited album of the year Grammy and reset cultural conversations surrounding Blackness, Americanness and American roots music.

Queen Bey saved her first live showcase of the album’s song for Netflix’s inaugural NFL Christmas Day halftime show, affectionately dubbed Beyoncé Bowl, which netted her an Emmy Award for outstanding costumes for variety, nonfiction or reality programming. Though many viewers didn’t pick up on her presence until later in the show, Blue Ivy appeared as a dancer throughout the 13-minute extravaganza, rocking out to “Ya Ya” and nailing hitch kicks to “Texas Hold ‘Em.”

Not only did Blue Ivy flaunt her growth from the previous year’s Renaissance World Tour, but she also offered a preview of what she had in store for the following year’s Cowboy Carter Tour, where she rocked an “America Has a Problem” dance solo and performed throughout the three-hour show.

Blue Ivy owned the stage every night of the Cowboy Carter Tour, but no moment was as electric as when she strutted down the main catwalk to the opening notes of her parents’ classic “Déjà Vu” collaboration and Kevin JZ Prodigy’s powerful custom ballroom chants.

From her flowing boho braids and that nasty spin move to her effortlessly cool execution of the original 2006 choreography, Blue Ivy had each stadium crowd in the palm of her hands during the “Déjà Blue” interlude.” As the tour progressed, Blue would experiment with different costumes and props (a cowboy hat, of course, made an appearance), as well as different styles of catwalks. Nonetheless, her most powerful Cowboy Carter Tour moment came at the final show in Las Vegas, where Destiny’s Child reunited and passed the proverbial torch to the literal Child of Destiny. Talk about poetic!