When it comes to performing sold-out stadiums, this isn’t Blue Ivy Carter’s first rodeo. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour — which concludes July 26 with the last of 32 shows — was more like a victory lap for the 13-year-old, who has gone from making a brief cameo during the Renaissance world tour in 2023 to dancing in more than a dozen songs a night. With viral videos of “Manager Blue Ivy,” fans encouraged her stardom and watched her come into it in her own right.
“Honestly? She probably gets more engagement than Beyoncé does,” says Eden, a college student who runs @cozycarters, an Instagram fan page for Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s family with 75,000 followers. On May 4, Eden brought a sign that declared “WE L♡VE YOU MANAGER BLUE” to the third night of the Cowboy Carter tour in Los Angeles. She didn’t initially catch the moment when Blue Ivy gestured at her sign (“Beyoncé was also in front of us,” Eden explains), so the Grammy-winning Lion King voice actress waited until there was another opening in the choreography. Then, in a video that now has more than 10 million views on Instagram, Blue pointed and flashed another thumbs-up. “She was really trying to make sure that I knew that she acknowledged me,” Eden recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’”
While the concept of Blue Ivy being in charge isn’t new — as a child, she attentively monitored performances everywhere from the Video Music Awards to Coachella and never seemed afraid to tell her famous family members to stop clapping or cut the cameras — this was the first time the teenager had publicly embraced the BeyHive’s nickname for her. Considering the harsh assessments Blue Ivy has been subjected to throughout her childhood, there’s a weight to seeing her happily claim a title that celebrates her as so capable that she might as well be running the show. In one viral moment in the Renaissance concert film, Blue Ivy insisted that her mom not take a fan-favorite track off the set list; when Brazilian content creator Neto Borelli crossed continents to attend the Cowboy Carter tour Stateside, he held up a heartfelt message: “Manager Blue, thank you for saving ‘Diva.’ We all love you.” Blue Ivy pointed and nodded approvingly when she saw it. For Borelli, the manager memes are a way of encouraging her to “be herself and be even more confident,” especially since, we learn in the film, she’s the one who asked to be onstage. “She’s our favorite nepo baby,” Borelli says. “We see how dedicated she is.”
On the Cowboy Carter tour, the results of her efforts are clear. The BeyHive sees Beyoncé in Blue Ivy, but it’s not just because, as Eden puts it, she “stole her mother’s entire face.” (Though multiple fans mistook a Beyoncé tour shirt for Blue Ivy merch, prompting one commenter to helpfully clarify, “That’s Blue Ivy Sr.”) She takes center stage during “America Has a Problem,” leads a “Deja Vu” dance break after strutting down the stage in a Naomi Campbell–approved runway walk, and even finds time to take out her earbud and ensure that the audience’s vocals are up to par. Her facial expressions, professionalism, and execution of choreography are giving fans Déjà Blue, to borrow a phrase from a shirt that concertgoers had the opportunity to purchase only in Paris. “She’s outdancing these professional dancers — and she’s outdancing her mom, I’m just gonna say it right now,” says Atlanta-based actor Steven Etienne, who once drove 600 miles to see Beyoncé in concert.
On his TikTok, @thestevensteven, Etienne has taken the premise that Blue Ivy is a professional a step further, imagining a world where she’s clocking in as manager and emailing feedback after shows. His videos — in which he “types” on a bag of rice — often reference real moments from the tour and have been a consistent source of entertainment for members of the “Ivy League,” who keep the bit going in the comments. “I think at the root of it, we have such an immense respect for Beyoncé that we then inherently have a respect for her offspring and want to uplift her as much as we can,” says Etienne. “It just spiraled. It probably started like, ‘Oh, Blue can dance.’ Then it started to be, ‘Blue is probably choreographing,’ to ‘Blue’s giving notes,’ to ‘Blue has ideas for the tour,’ to ‘Blue is the tour.’” It’s important for Etienne to clarify that he’s not attempting to cosplay as the real Blue Ivy with his videos, but rather riff on a fictionalized universe inspired by the fandom’s long-running joke. “I really don’t want to add any sort of narrative onto this 13-year-old girl that she’s rude, a brat, a diva, any of that,” he says. “That’s not what we’re doing here.”
Blue Ivy fans have reason to be protective. Although Beyoncé was once the type of celebrity who went on press tours where she did rhyming interviews and fielded questions about foot-and-mouth disease, she now has a reputation as one of the industry’s more private artists. And that extends to her children; most of the time when we see or hear Blue Ivy, she’s at a work event with her mom. Still, there’s only so much privacy the world will afford you when your parents reportedly have a combined net worth of more than $3 billion. The first photos of her as a newborn were shared alongside a handwritten request to respect the family’s privacy. But that didn’t stop grown adults, from entertainment journalists to 50 Cent, from commenting on an infant Blue Ivy’s looks online and suggesting that she looked too much like her dad. The scrutiny reached new heights in 2023. In the Renaissance film, the mother of three says she was “pretty disappointed” that her 11-year-old saw “some comments that were not great” on social media. But by the end of the tour, side-by-side comparisons were undeniable evidence of how far she’d come.
This time around, when Beyoncé sings “Protector” during the Cowboy Carter tour, she is joined onstage by both Blue Ivy and 8-year-old Rumi. There have been some digital think pieces written about Rumi’s smiley personality, and for the most part, the internet has been thrilled to embrace the younger Carter daughter. “It’s been really, really great to see everybody’s reactions and all the positive feedback this time around, versus what it was when Blue first came out,” Eden says. “I hope that it continues.” If Blue already proved herself during the Renaissance tour, then the Cowboy Carter tour was where she could be herself: enjoy being a model, teach her mom and grandma TikTok dances, and mentor someone even newer to the stage, following in a Knowles family tradition.
At around 11 years old, Beyoncé was interviewed on Good Morning Houston and asked about how she deals with nerves as a member of Destiny’s Child precursor Girl’s Tyme. “Well, I guess if we keep on practicing and practicing, and we keep on performing, every time we get better,” Beyoncé said at the time. “And the stage fright just fades away.” Decades later, she would recall seeing her own 11-year-old daughter get nervous before her first performance and then rehearse even more after seeing the internet’s response. “I mean, there was lots of negative things that people had to say,” Blue Ivy concedes in the Renaissance film before unintentionally echoing her mother. “But I can see that the more that I do it, the better I become.”
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