Amid the many closely examined facets of Jay-Z’s role in coproducing his first Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, there’s his and Beyoncé’s apparent decision to sit during the national anthem. On Sunday TMZ circulated a video of the couple sitting during Demi Lovato’s performance, and given that Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest during the anthem was at the center of the series of events that led to Jay-Z’s partnership with the NFL, the footage led to speculation that Jay-Z might be protesting the anthem too.
On Tuesday night, Page Six reported that Jay-Z said this characterization was off. At a Columbia University lecture series Tuesday night, the tabloid said, a moderator asked him whether sitting was “meant to convey a signal.”
“It actually wasn’t—sorry,” Jay-Z replied, adding that if he’d intended to make a political statement, “I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve done.’ I think people know that about me.”
The reason for his sitting, he said, was practical: “What happened was, we got there, we were sitting, and now the show’s about to start. My wife was with me and so she says to me, ‘I know this feeling right here.’ Like, she’s super-nervous because she’s performed at Super Bowls before. I haven’t. So we get there and we immediately jump into artist mode…now I’m really just looking at the show. Did the mic start? Was it too low to start?”
That conversation lasted through the performance, he added, and it was only after Lovato finished singing that Jay-Z was alerted in a phone call that he hadn’t been standing.
Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s halftime show on Sunday was widely praised for both the performance itself and its political content. That was one moment, Jay-Z said, when a statement was intended. “I didn’t have to make a silent protest,” he said Tuesday night. “If you look at the stage and the artists that we chose—Colombian [Shakira] and Puerto Rican J. Lo—we were making the loudest statement…And we had…commercial running [on] social injustice during the Super Bowl…given the context, I didn’t have to make a silent protest.” (During the game, an NFL-produced commercial featured former Arizona Cardinals wide receiver Anquan Boldin speaking about his cousin Corey Jones, who was killed by a police officer in 2015.)
Since a partnership between Jay-Z’s Roc Nation and the NFL was announced in August, it’s raised many questions about both parties’ motivations; the financial details of the deal haven’t been disclosed. Kaepernick hasn’t played in the league since the beginning of 2017, a few months after he started kneeling during the anthem. Though Jay-Z’s participation may have helped the league trade up its halftime show compared to last year’s Maroon 5 performance, the NFL remains mired in controversy—and Kaepernick’s continuing exclusion from the league was only highlighted by the confusion around the workout it organized for him in November.
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