JAY-Z explains why he and Beyoncé sat during the National Anthem at Super Bowl

Jay-Z is setting the record straight after he and Beyoncé stirred controversy for remaining seated during the 2020 Super Bowl's national anthem presentation.

The rapper addressed the backlash during a lecture series Q&A at Columbia University on Tuesday night.

Jay-Z—who co-produced this year's halftime show and is a partner of the NFL—denied that by not standing up for Demi Lovato's performance, he and Bey were making a subtle political statement.

“It actually wasn’t — sorry. I’d tell you … I’d say, ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve done.’ I think people know that about me," he said. 

"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. 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 went on to explain.

“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 also said he wouldn't have planned to make a purposeful statement with his daughter, Blue Ivy, right there.

“Blue [Ivy] 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.'”

“I didn’t have to make a silent protest...if you look at the stage and the artists that we chose — Columbian [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.”