Taylor Swift, Pink & More Who Passed on the Super Bowl Halftime Show
Would Miley Cyrus Ever Headline the Super Bowl Halftime Show? She Says...
Jay-Z may have 99 problems, but turning down the opportunity to headline the Super Bowl Halftime Show has never come back to haunt him.
Regardless of the 25-time Grammy winner's previous reluctance to perform during those pivotal 13 minutes, his company Roc Nation has been producing the spectacle since 2020—and the rapper born Shawn Carter will be taking the stage himself during Super Bowl LXI on Feb. 14, 2027.
Which, yes, means that Taylor Swift will not be doing it.
Not that she was asked yet again, but, every year... let's just say, it comes up.
"Jay-Z has always been very good to me," Swift shared on The Tonight Show last October, explaining why she hasn't yet taken her talents to that particular stage. “Our teams are really close. They sometimes will call and say, 'How does she feel about the Super Bowl?' And that's not an official offer or like a conference room conversation. We’re really close, it’s like, 'How does she feel about it in general?'"
She also cited being way too emotionally invested in "a guy who does that sport on that field" to focus on putting on a show.
And now that she has married Travis Kelce—and, incidentally, the Kansas City Chiefs are off to a 5-0 start—the timing once again isn't right.
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But never say never—Rihanna once said no and then performed in 2023, the first year it became the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show—because, as Jay-Z has realized, even though the conditions might be unfavorable one year, they could become a lot more favorable down the road.
Especially if you're in charge of programming the whole damn thing.
But despite it being an illustrious gig—Beyoncé, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Prince, Tom Petty and Michael Jackson all said yes at least once—artists have had their reasons for turning it down.
And here they are. Read on to see the stars who've said no to headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show:
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Pink
Pink got the party started by singing the national anthem in 2018, but she passed on the halftime slot the following year.
"Everybody that does it gets so persecuted," she told Billboard in 2019. And she surmised that she was probably too political for the NFL's taste, quipping, "I’d probably take a knee and get carried out."
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Cardi B
Cardi B was on the same page as Pink that year, telling the Associated Press she also turned down the halftime show in 2019 out of solidarity with former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In the wake of the backlash over him taking a knee during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, he opted out of his final season with the team in 2017 and was never signed by another.
"My husband, he loves football," Cardi, who was married to Offset at the time, explained. "He really wants to go to the Super Bowl, but he can’t go to the Super Bowl, because he’s got to stand for something."
As she put it, "there’s a man who sacrificed his job for us, so we got to stand behind him.”
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Rihanna
Rihanna also said no to the NFL in 2018 for the same reason, telling Vogue in 2019, "I couldn’t dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sellout. I couldn’t be an enabler. There’s things within that organization that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way.”
So, when she said yes to headlining the halftime show in 2023, she explained to British Vogue, "There’s still a lot of mending to be done in my eyes, but it’s powerful to break those doors, and have representation at such a high, high level and a consistent level.”
And, coming a year after Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J. Blige, Eminem and Kendrick Lamar held court, that meant "two Super Bowls back to back, you know, representing the urban community, globally."
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Adele
Lady Gaga headlined the 2017 Super Bowl Halftime Show (at the time still Pepsi-branded), but supposedly Adele turned it down first.
“First of all, I’m not doing the Super Bowl. I mean, come on, that show is not about music," Adele told an audience at L.A.'s Staples Center in August 2016. "I can’t dance or anything like that. They were very kind, they did ask me, but I said no."
The NFL and Pepsi subsequently denied she'd been offered the gig. But in case you're wondering why no one has ever set fire to the rain between halves of the big game, that's why.
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Taylor Swift
For starters, Taylor Swift was the face of Diet Coke from 2013 until 2018, during which the halftime show was a Pepsi production.
Then she's said to have been too mired in both churning out new music and rerecording the albums she made for Big Machine Records, her response to Scooter Braun acquiring the rights to her back catalogue when his company Ithaca Holdings bought the label in 2019.
And then, in 2023, she started dating the guy on the Chiefs, so the halftime show just hit too close to home.
Though Roc Nation founder Jay-Z's team regularly checked in on where she was on the yea-or-nay scale, "We're always able to tell him the truth, which is that I am in love with a guy who does that sport on that field," Swift said on The Tonight Show in 2025. "That is violent chess, that is gladiators without swords. That is dangerous...The whole season, I am locked in on what that man is doing on the field."
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Jay-Z
Speaking of Jay-Z, a few years before Roc Nation struck a deal with the NFL to start producing the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2020, he was approached to do the honors himself.
But when he was told to bring on Kanye West and Rihanna to join him on "Run this Town," he was no longer in the right state of mind.
“Of course I would have,” Jay-Z told the New York Times before Super Bowl LIV in 2020, “but I said, ‘No, you get me.’ That is not how you go about it, telling someone that they’re going to do the halftime show contingent on who they bring. I said forget it. It was a principle thing.”
He finally agreed to take the stage for the 2027 gig.
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Outkast
Um, sorry Ms. Jackson?
Big Boi said in 2015 that Outkast turned down playing the Super Bowl Halftime Show hot on the heels of their 2003 album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below blowing up because André 3000 "didn’t want to cut the songs."
"He wanted to do the full songs,” Big Boi recalled on The Dan Le Batard Show. “He said, ‘Nah, can’t do it.'" (Big Boi didn't have such qualms when he joined the party in 2019 during Maroon 5's headlining set in his hometown of Atlanta.)
But if he meant they said no to the 2004 halftime show, that means Outkast duo could have been on that stage—maybe in addition to, but perhaps instead of, a group that included Jessica Simpson, Kid Rock, Nelly and, er, Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson.
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Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton was under the impression that the Super Bowl Halftime Show was too big for her.
"I’ve been offered that many times,” the late icon told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “I couldn’t do it because of other things, or I just didn’t think I was big enough to do it—to do that big of a production. When you think about those shows, those are big, big productions. I’ve never done anything with that big of a production. I don’t know if I could have. I think at the time that’s what I was thinking.”
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