Jay-Z Confirmed For Super Bowl 2027 Halftime Show

Last week, a number of sources reported that Jay-Z had effectively selected himself as the headliner for next year's Super Bowl Halftime Show. Jay's company Roc Nation has produced every Halftime Show since 2020, so Jay effectively selected himself here. The reaction to the news of Jay as headliner has not been unanimously positive, but any backlash wasn't enough to prevent the inevitable. Today, the NFL has confirmed it: Jay-Z is going to the Super Bowl. An extremely brief teaser video has Jay-Z, filmed in crisp black and white, sitting in an empty stadium and scowling in the general direction of the camera as Just Blaze's piano notes from "Public Service Announcement (Interlude)" ring out. A message appears oncreen: "The GOAT's out of the bag."As NPR reports, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell claims that he had one request when the league made the production deal with Roc Nation: He wanted Jay to perform at the Super Bowl "whenever the moment felt right to him." In a statement, Jay says, "From Reasonable Doubt to standing on the Super Bowl halftime stage, this has been a journey. Thirty years of music, work, and culture on the world's biggest stage. This run continues to be a dream come true."The Super Bowl is coming to SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California Feb. 14. Jay-Z headlined two shows at the same venue last weekend, bringing in many special guests and dismissing reports of soft ticket sales as AI "tricknology." Jay has returned to the stage in a series of stadium shows this year, and he's also cut off his dreadlocks, switching things up so that he'll once again look like the classic version of himself, which feels like it was all leading up to this announcement.At this point, Jay-Z has been semi-retired from music for nearly a decade — much longer than the period of time in which he supposedly actually retired after The Black Album. His Halftime Show will follow those from Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny, two artists who were having tremendous zeitgeist moments in their respective years. Jay can't claim anything like that, and his booking feels like more of a classic Super Bowl nostalgia move, like all those years when the Rolling Stones or Tom Petty or the Who would play the big show.My colleague Chris DeVille got a lot of pushback last week for noting that Jay is a great live performer with a ton of hits, but that's the truth! I've seen Jay live many times, and when he's got a crowd of his fans rocking with him, he is tremendous. (Or at least he was tremendous; it's probably been 15 years since I've seen him live.) But Jay doesn't have a lot of experience with the kind of overwhelming, heavily choreographed 15-minute spectacle that the Halftime Show has become, and we'll just have to see whether he's up to it.