On Monday the NFL named Jay-Z as the headliner for this season’s Super Bowl half-time show. His company, Roc Nation, produces the show under a 2019 deal reportedly worth $5m a year, and the agreement was extended for another five years in 2024. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said his one request when the partnership began was that Jay-Z “take the stage himself one day“.
Goodell’s wish makes total sense: Jay-Z is the perfect choice for the half-time show, and that’s not a compliment. The NFL wants a shill who can still pass for a rebel, and nobody in American music plays that part better than Jay-Z. Jay-Z’s origin story has become an American legend.
Years before he sold records, Shawn Carter grew up in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses and sold crack as a teenager. When labels passed on him, he hawked CDs from the trunk of his car on college campuses. Then he put out Reasonable Doubt in 1996 on his own label, Roc-A-Fella.
In 2013, he performed Picasso Baby, a track about the paintings he wanted to own, for six hours straight at a Chelsea gallery, and Marina Abramović joined him. By the time of The Story of OJ in 2017, he was handing out financial advice. Forbes puts his fortune at about $2.8bn.
He raps for the rich now, a Black oligarch who seems about as cut off from the rest of the country as the rest of the billionaire class. His bootstraps story mirrors the platitudes Americans have been told for decades – work hard and you’ll get what you deserve. On paper, he’s the perfect avatar for America’s polluted ideas of capitalism.
But the country Jay-Z is rapping to is in terrible shape. How many of us can relate to his lyrics in 2026? Gas and grocery prices have rocketed.
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