Jay-Z Gives Explanation For Sitting During Super Bowl National Anthem

Jay-Z says he and wife Beyoncé were not making a statement when they sat during the national anthem at the Super Bowl. He was just focused on his job as a producer.

At a Columbia University Q&A as part of a lecture series Tuesday night, a moderator asked the rapper — who co-produced the entertainment at this year’s Super Bowl — whether sitting when Demi Lovato sang the national anthem was “meant to convey a signal?”

“It actually wasn’t — sorry,” said the music mogul, 50. He said that if he’d wanted to make a political statement, “I’d tell you … I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve done.’ I think people know that about me.”

But he explained, “What happened was, we got there, we were sitting, and now the show’s about to start. My wife was with me and so she says to me, ‘I know this feeling right here.’ Like, she’s super-nervous because she’s performed at Super Bowls before. I haven’t,” he said to laughs from the audience. “So we get there and we immediately jump into artist mode … now I’m really just looking at the show. Did the mic start? Was it too low to start? … I had to explain to them [that] as an artist, if you don’t feel the music, you can’t really reach that level.”

He added, “So the whole time we’re sitting there, we’re talking about the performance, and then right after that, Demi [Lovato] comes out and we’re talking about how beautiful she looked, and how she sounds and what she’s going through, and her life — for her to be on the stage, we were so proud of her. And then it finished and then my phone rang. And it was like, ‘You know you didn’t …’ I’m like, ‘What?'”

He said the couple wouldn’t have made such a plan anyway with 8-year-old daughter Blue Ivy there.

“Blue was right next to us, we wouldn’t do that to Blue and put her in that position. And if anyone who knows Blue … If we told her we were going to do something like that, you would have seen her attacking me 100 times. She’s the kid that gets in the car and closes the door and says, ‘Are we there yet, Daddy?’ So she would say, ‘What time? Are we doing it? Are we doing it now? It’s 7:05, Daddy … It’s 7:06.'”

The rapper said, “I didn’t have to make a silent protest … If you look at the stage and the artists that we chose — Colombian [Shakira] and Puerto Rican J.Lo — we were making the loudest statement … And we had … a commercial running [on] social injustice during the Super Bowl … Given the context, I didn’t have to make a silent protest.”

The NFL ran an ad during the game showing Cardinals player Anquan Boldin talking about a cousin who was killed by a police officer in 2015.

TMZ posted video on Sunday of the celebrity couple sitting along with their daughter at the game at Hard Rock Stadium.

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