Have you ever been hanging out with several other guys who listen to rap music, when one of them said to put on some Jay-Z? Me neither, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about since it was announced that he’s performing at next year’s Super Bowl.

Well, we don’t know for a fact that he’s performing. It’s yet to be officially announced. He might be waiting to announce it during a big upcoming show in LA, or this might be rage-bait content posted by someone who lives in India, who’s only pretending to be black.

It could end up being some Latinx nonsense that no one ever heard of, that you then pretend to have enjoyed in order to appear to have the correct views, for the benefit of any young broads on your job who might overhear. With all due respect.

If the response to this Jay-Z semi-announcement on social media is any indication, it won’t be necessary to pretend to have liked his performance. Certainly, I wouldn’t mention the names of any particular songs you enjoyed, or guest performers you were surprised to see, if, say, Freeway is not busy that weekend. They might start doing the math on how old you were in 1998.

Young people, it seems, don’t care for Jay-Z. On X f/k/a Twitter, the consensus seems to be that no one actually listens to his music, and that he shouldn’t have been allowed to pick himself to perform at the Super Bowl. His self-selection has been compared to Dick Cheney picking himself to be vice president, and the fact that people would even know that suggests to me that it’s not just kids. Being 20 years old and knowing that Dick Cheney was put in charge of picking George W. Bush’s vice president would be like me knowing who was in charge of picking Gerald Ford’s vice president. I hardly even know who Ford’s vice president was, and that’s only from watching a lot of Infowars back in my 30s.

Part of it might be that Jay-Z is seen as having sided with Kendrick Lamar during his beef with Drake a couple of years ago, and Drake support is staunch of my For You tab. (I’d describe some of the other things I’m regularly presented with, but I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about me.) When I click on posts, for example, about how Elliott Wilson is out here stealing money from people and how he played himself trying to start a podcast with DJ Vlad, seemingly all of the replies are from people apparently still upset about how the erstwhile magazine editor sided with Kendrick. Supposedly, he only did so after Drake stopped returning his phone calls, and Kendrick still called him a rat.

Jay-Z selected Kendrick to perform at the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, at more or less the height of his beef with Drake. The back and forth may have been more or less over at that point, but an entire stadium full of people calling Drake a PDF file, as it’s known on YouTube, may have been its most indelible moment. In a strictly statistical sense, there’s never been a moment when Kendrick Lamar was a more popular rapper than Drake, and there’s no reason why Drake shouldn’t have been selected to perform at the Super Bowl by now. When GQ magazine asked him about it, a while back, Jay scoffed at the idea that he would pick sides in a Drake-Kendrick Lamar beef. He’s got like a billion dollars. Why should he give a shit? He might have added that it’s not appropriate for people in the 40-and-up community to listen to either of those artists.

A Drake halftime show wouldn’t have been any good, except that he may have found a way to incorporate the “goth baddie” that he purchased on an online dating show. Her cans seem to fluctuate in size, and it would be interesting to see if she could rise to the occasion, so to speak. There’s also been some speculation that her cans are fake. This would have been an opportunity to prove once and for all that they’re real. It’s been entirely too long since we’ve had a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, and Drake can easily afford to pay any fine they might incur. Supposedly, he spends a healthy six-figure sum every time he flies somewhere on his plane.

If we’re being honest, I’d much rather see a Jay-Z halftime show. The question is, what songs will he perform. I’d much rather have a set focused on songs from back when he was still bitter about the fact that girls didn’t want to date him, because he looks like a camel, including my father’s favorite Jay-Z song “Girls, Girls, Girls,” but it’s likely that instead we’ll be treated to “Empire State of Mind” as the big climax—with guest vocals from Alicia Keys, no doubt. Will clips from the second Sex and the City movie be shown on the Jumbotron? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Alright that’s enough. We've all seen them, posts talking about "Lauryn Hill", "Future", "Jay Z", and other so called "rappers" no one's even heard of before. It's becoming increasingly clear that there's some complot to destroy our sub. On some gentrification shit. No one who seriously loves Hip and/or Hop would ever care about, let alone updoot, a post that isn't about "Kendrick" Dot-'worth' Lamar or 'Aubrey' Drake 666 "Graham".

As a mod, I think it's my responsibility to end this low effort nonsense. No more "2 Packs". No more "Big-ees". No more Big Daddy Kane. Only Kenny and Drizzy related posts will be allowed.

Kanye posts are also fine as long as they're smut