He’s getting ready for a reunion with The Roots for the upcoming Roots Picnic in Philadelphia concert on 30 May and the 56-year-old singer has decided to re-jig things a bit.<\/p>\n
The artist formerly known as Jay-Z<\/a> will now go by the moniker JA\u0178-Z, which you’ll notice has one of those umlaut things above the ‘y’, and he’s been busy changing his name on all of his platforms.<\/p>\n It’s probable that he’s actually got someone to do that for him, but when you look for him now it’s done under the name ‘JA\u0178-Z’ when you’re trying to find his music on the likes of YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify.<\/p>\n The reason behind Jay-Z’s name change E News<\/a> suggested it might be a tribute to his first album – 1996’s Reasonable Doubt – which is almost 30 years old as the cover art for it involved umlauts.<\/p>\n He’s far from the only artist to rock an umlaut, with M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce and Mot\u00f6rhead also sporting them.<\/p>\n Aside from making bands look edgier, umlauts are used in Germanic languages to change the sound of vowels and distinguish between different words.<\/p>\n As for why Jay-Z is called Jay-Z at all, he told Q Magazine in 2000: “When I was young, I was a cool, laidback little dude, so they called me Jazzy. Later, that turned into Jay-Z.\u201d<\/p>\n It’s not the first time he’s been fiddling around with his name.<\/p>\n The evolution of Jay-Z’s name Back in 2013, Jay-Z dropped the hyphen to become known as ‘Jay Z’, as the singer said it was ‘really big back in the day’ but ‘not useful any more’.<\/p>\n He’d told Big Boys Neighbourhood at the time: “I had umlauts over one of the letters. I removed the umlaut, too.”<\/p>\n His only album cover to lose the hyphen was 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail – but he also styled his name struck through so it was hard to tell.<\/p>\n The change to the name didn’t last particularly long as in 2017 he got his hyphen back as a statement released at the time declared: “‘Jay Z’ is now a relic of the past, consigned to the dustbin of history.<\/p>\n “In its place stands JAY-Z, now with the hyphen back in its place and the whole name in all-caps.”<\/p>\n And as if this couldn’t get any more confusing, on the album cover for 2017’s 4:44, he styled his name JAY:Z.<\/p>\n And now he’s got some dots above the name as well.<\/p>\n He’s not the only famous performer to keep changing his name, and he’s had beef with one of them in particular.<\/p>\n Last year JA\u0178-Z got into a bit of a spat with Kanye West, who changed his name to ‘Ye’ and then to ‘Ye Ye’, after the much-maligned musician went after his children.<\/p>\n In response, he and his wife Beyonc\u00e9<\/a> sang the song ‘N****s in Paris’ but tweaked the lyrics to omit Kanye’s name<\/a> and subbed in Beyonce’s instead.<\/p>\n While they’d made hits together in the past, many music fans saw it as a signal that they were done professionally.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jay-Z has changed his name on all of his platforms, and it’s not the first time he’s tweaked…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533338,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,2692,88,216],"class_list":["post-533337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-celebrity","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533337\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Don't](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHQ2NzA1NTcw.webp\"\/)
Don’t call him Jay-Z, he’s JA\u0178-Z now (Kevin C. Cox\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"Jay-Z](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHRjMmM4Mjc4.webp\"\/)
Jay-Z originally used an umlaut (Roc-A-Fella\/Priority)<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHQyYjEwNGQ0.webp\"\/)
The hyphen disappeared on Magna Carta Holy Grail (Roc-A-Fella\/Roc Nation\/Universal)<\/p>\n![\"He](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHQ3YTIwZDM4.webp\"\/)
He briefly experimented with a colon (Andrew Harrer\/Bloomberg via Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"It](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/aHR0cHM6Ly9ldS1pbWFnZXMuY29udGVudHN0YWNrLmNvbS92My9hc3NldHMvYmx0Y2Q3NGFjYzFkMGE5OWYzYS9ibHQ4ODM0ZTQy.webp\"\/)
It may be a tribute to his debut album which is nearing 30 years since it was released (Alex Bierens de Haan\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n