Jay-Z Rapped 'I Said No to the Super Bowl.' Now His Own Company Picked Him to Headline It

Jay-Z, the rap mogul whose company has helped pick every Super Bowl halftime act since it signed on with the NFL in 2019, has picked his next headliner. It's Jay-Z.

The NFL, Apple Music and Jay-Z's Roc Nation announced Monday night that he will headline the Super Bowl LXI halftime show on Feb. 14, 2027, at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California. The news dropped at halftime of the Cowboys-Eagles game on ESPN, the network that will carry the Super Bowl. Roc Nation will also executive produce the telecast, so the man on stage is also the man running the show.

"From Reasonable Doubt to standing on the Super Bowl Halftime stage, this has been a journey," Jay-Z said in the joint release. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said his "one request" when the league signed Roc Nation was "that JAŸ-Z take the stage himself one day, whenever the moment felt right to him."

"I said no to the Super Bowl"

That moment took a while, and Jay-Z spent years saying it wasn't coming. In 2018, during the fight over players kneeling for the national anthem, he rapped on the Carters' song "APES**T": "I said no to the Super Bowl, you need me, I don't need you."

A year later he went into business with the league anyway. Roc Nation became the NFL's live-music strategist, with a hand in choosing halftime performers and a role in the league's Inspire Change social-justice program. At the August 2019 press conference in Roc Nation's New York office, Jay-Z said the first thing he told Goodell was: "If this is about me performing at the Super Bowl, then we can just end this conversation now."

At that same press conference, a reporter asked whether he would kneel or stand for the anthem. "I think we're past kneeling. I think it's time for action," he said, according to Variety's account. That line angered Colin Kaepernick's allies. Eric Reid, Kaepernick's former teammate, publicly criticized the deal.

By January 2024 the door was cracked. "I thought it would be selfish to pick myself too early," he told Entertainment Tonight. "Maybe one year." This is the year.

After Bad Bunny

The pick comes eight months after Roc Nation's last choice blew up into a culture war. Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican star who backed Kamala Harris and has slammed Trump's deportations, sang his February halftime show almost entirely in Spanish. Trump didn't hold back. "The Super Bowl Halftime Show is absolutely terrible, one of the worst, EVER!" he posted on Truth Social that night, calling it "an affront to the Greatness of America" and "a 'slap in the face' to our Country." Turning Point USA staged its own "All-American Halftime Show" headlined by Kid Rock.

The NFL's own ratings release tells part of the story. Super Bowl LX hit an all-time U.S. record of 137.8 million viewers late in the second quarter. Bad Bunny's halftime show then averaged 128.2 million, about 9.6 million fewer than the game's peak just minutes earlier.

Jay-Z's own politics

Jay-Z is not a neutral pick either. He headlined a get-out-the-vote concert for Barack Obama in 2008 and another for Hillary Clinton in Cleveland four days before the 2016 election. There, he told the crowd that Trump's "conversation is divisive, and that's not an evolved soul to me, so he cannot be my president." He added: "He cannot be our president."

Trump won anyway. Now the President who was "not my president" is in his second term, and the league that once looked like it was moving past the anthem fights has handed its biggest stage to one of Trump's loudest celebrity critics and to the company that chose Bad Bunny.

What's next

No guest performers have been named. Hamish Hamilton will direct the show, which airs on ESPN, ABC and Disney+, with Spanish-language broadcasts on ESPN Deportes and Univision. Jay-Z just closed his 30th-anniversary tour with two shows at SoFi on Oct. 23 and 24, so he already knows the room.

The NFL hopes nostalgia brings back the fans who changed the channel in February. Jay-Z gets the stage he once said he didn't need, and this time, he picked himself.