NFL Taps Jay-Z for 2027 Super Bowl Halftime, Seven Years After Roc Nation Deal

The NFL announced that Jay-Z will headline the halftime show at the 2027 Super Bowl in February. The performance lands seven years after his entertainment company, Roc Nation, signed a 2019 deal to book the league's annual Super Bowl acts. The arrangement carried a $25 million paycheck attached to it. He is not the first rapper to play the halftime show, but he is the first act to hold the booking role for that slot.

The announcement arrives after a year in which Jay-Z has worked to reshape his public image. A civil lawsuit that named him and Sean "Diddy" Combs as co-defendants over rape allegations was recently recanted. He denied the allegations from the start and filed a defamation and extortion suit against the filing attorney, Tony Buzbee; an appellate court dismissed that case. Combs also denied the allegations against him and received a sentence of more than four years in prison on prostitution-related charges.

In March, speaking to GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe, he described his posture for the year ahead: "We played enough defense, 2026 is all offense." He marked the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt, brought back the umlauts in his name, and cut the long locs he had grown for his daughter Blue Ivy and his late uncle. He then played three straight nights at Yankee Stadium, selling out the run.

At the first of those shows, he rapped a capella in response to criticism over releasing a vinyl reissue through Target while a grassroots Black boycott of the retailer was underway over its DEI policy changes: "They say I sold out. Yeah, I did sell out. Three nights. I sold Yankee Stadium the hell out." He has faced similar pushback before. When Harry Belafonte called out Jay and Beyonce in 2012 and 2013 over Black celebrities who "turn[ed] their back on social responsibility," he answered Elliot Wilson in an interview with "My presence is charity." He also pursued criminal justice reforms addressing incarceration rates in the Black community, and his 2010 book Decoded, written with dream hampton, gave first-person context to his lyrics.

Critics have read his career differently. Former hip-hop journalist Toure recently said, "Over and over, Jay is the one that powerful whites use to quiet Negro protests so they can make more money together," comparing him to a house Negro who aligns with the white power structure while claiming to represent Black advancement. Video essayist F.D Signifier places him in the "Black misleadership class." Jay-Z himself, in the final episode of the HBO documentary Jay-Z in 8, which he co-executive produced, describes so-called race hustlers and house Negroes acting as "extortionists" who "go to one place and say: You want our support? Give us the money." In that same episode he says, "We're not getting it as a race together. We're slowly getting there separately, but it's not a concerted effort of us to align our powers and our finances to benefit our community."

The eight-episode series pairs him with former Def Jam founder Rick Rubin for listening sessions in France's former stock exchange. They cover the Che Guevara reference in his lyrics, his confrontation with his father one month before the man's death, and details from his hustling years. His father left the family when Jay-Z was 11. When he takes the halftime stage at SoFi Stadium next year, it will be his first time performing that slot as the act in charge of booking it.

Jay-Z's business record includes a role in the Nets-NBA arrangement that brought Barclays Center to Brooklyn. He took a .067 percent ownership stake. He also worked with Roger Goodell and the NFL at a time when the league faced questions over Colin Kaepernick's protests. Kaepernick has since offered his own account of how that relationship functioned; Jay-Z has not responded to those comments.