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. “Nobody would sign me,” he said later. The money followed. 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. SNAP enrollment fell more than 13% in a year as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act tightened the rules. Only 63% of adults say they could cover a surprise $400 expense.

You can see why the NFL would use Jay-Z as someone who can give the appearance that the league, with its huge conservative fanbase, is actually progressive. He wore Colin Kaepernick’s jersey on Saturday Night Live in 2017 after the quarterback had sparked a protest movement against police brutality by kneeling for the national anthem. Jay-Z then dedicated The Story of OJ to Kaepernick onstage. A year later, on Apeshit, he bragged about turning down the Super Bowl and told the NFL it needed him more than he needed it.

Things would soon change.

In June 2019, Forbes named him hip-hop’s first billionaire. A few months later, Roc Nation signed its deal with the NFL. But at the news conference announcing his NFL partnership, Jay-Z no longer appeared as receptive to Kaepernick’s approach to protest. “We’ve moved past kneeling,” he said. That same year, Kaepernick settled his collusion grievance against the league after he said his protests had effectively ended his playing career.

The 2019 deal also put Roc Nation to work on Inspire Change, the league’s social justice initiative. It’s safe to say that Kaepernick was unimpressed. “I just want you to know, one, you’re serving the culture up to a bunch of racists and, two, they don’t care about you,” Kaepernick later recalled saying to Jay-Z. “You’re the music guy to them. They quite literally need a Black face – and have said as much.”

Seven years later, Jay-Z is still battling Kaepernick, the man who says he was blackballed by the NFL. This summer, Jay-Z linked up with Target, which had been boycotted by many Black customers after it rolled back its diversity and inclusion policies. Kaepernick, on the other hand, said he would not allow his memoir to be sold at any of the chain’s stores. At a concert in July, Jay-Z rapped that Kaepernick had allowed himself to be silenced by signing his grievance with the NFL (sources close to Kaepernick have denied this). “Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you have to sign a non-disparagement. I’m the one [the NFL] can’t control,” Jay-Z rapped to the crowd at Yankee Stadium.

Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t appear that Jay-Z is doing much to control – or change – the league either. In 2021, USA Today’s Mike Freeman wrote: “There isn’t a single, tangible thing you can point to that shows Jay-Z helping with the league’s social justice efforts.” That’s a little unfair; through Inspire Change the NFL has funnelled millions into charities across America. At the same time, the NFL is mostly run by the same old, rich conservatives it always has been. There is still no Black majority owner of a team, and Forbes now puts the combined value of the league’s 32 teams at more than $300bn. In 2025, Donald Trump, who once called NFL players who protested during the national anthem “sons of bitches”, became the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl, and that same week the league pulled “End Racism” from the endzones in New Orleans. That slogan had been on NFL fields since 2020 as part of Inspire Change.

Conservatives have noticed. A Daily Wire column hailed Jay-Z as a “legend” and told readers there likely wouldn’t be any anti-ICE activists onstage at this season’s halftime show, adding that “after last year’s Bad Bunny debacle, Jay-Z offers a compromise.”

That’s about right. Jay-Z won’t have anybody to push against at the Super Bowl. The NFL is Roc Nation’s client, and the team owners are its partners. As we saw with the Target debacle, whatever Jay-Z says up there, he’s unlikely to go against the people who pay him.