OK, we got it all wrong. Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter wasn’t protesting at the Super Bowl after all, according to CNN.
Jay-Z and his wife, Beyoncé, remained seated while Demi Lovato sang the national anthem at Sunday’s Super Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. As Lovato belted out the tune, cameras zoomed in on the power couple, who remained seated.
The media, music fans, and sports fans went crazy assuming that this was a planned statement by the Carters in solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers’ quarterback
Colin Kaepernick‘s racial injustice crusade. It even drew a sarcastic response from Kaepernick himself when he shared a screenshot of a TMZ Sports article about the couple’s appearance in an Instagram story on his account. “I thought we were ‘past kneeling’ tho” he wrote over the image, which can be seen at Hip Hop DX.Jay-Z was asked about the ‘silent’ protest the other day at Columbia University, where the school launched its Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter Lecture Series. Jay said he and his wife “immediately jump into artist mode” since his company Roc Nation produced the halftime performance featuring Jennifer Lopez and Shakira.
“So, I’m looking at the show,” he said. “‘Did our mic start? Was it too low to start?’ … ‘Is it too many speakers on the floor?'”
“So, the whole time we’re sitting there and we’re talking about the performance,” he added.
The rapper also mentioned that he would never involve his daughter Blue Ivy in a situation like that. “We wouldn’t do that to Blue and put her in that position,” he said, “If anyone knows Blue … if we told her we were gonna do something like that, you would have seen her tapping me a hundred times. She’s the kid that gets in the car and closes the door and says, ‘We there yet, Daddy?’ So she would say, ‘What time? Are we doing it?’”
“I didn’t have to make a silent protest. If you look at the stage, the artists that we chose, Colombian Shakira, Puerto Rican J-Lo. We were making the biggest loudest protest of all,” he said.