Rihanna has agreed to perform at the Super Bowl half-time show, three years after she turned down America’s most-watched concert in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
The world’s wealthiest female singer, with an estimated fortune of $1.4 billion, confirmed she would sing at the showpiece in February by posting a photograph of an NFL-branded football to her 136 million Instagram followers. It will be her first public performance since the 2018 Grammy awards.
In 2019 she declined to take part in the half-time show, one of the most coveted performing slots in the calendar. She cited Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who has not played in the NFL since he kneeled during the national anthem before games in 2016 to protest against racial injustice in the United States.
Kaepernick, who played at quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, filed a lawsuit against the NFL and claimed that the league’s owner tried to ban him from the sport after the gesture propelled a global movement against racism.
Rihanna, 34, said at the time she would not perform because she “couldn’t be a sell-out.” She toldVogue: “I couldn’t dare do that. For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I couldn’t be an enabler. There’s things within that organisation that I do not agree with at all, and I was not about to go and be of service to them in any way.”
Real name Robyn Rihanna Fenty, Rihanna has sold more than 250 million records and is one of the most successful artists in history but she has most recently built her fortune on make-up, skincare and lingerie businesses with the brands Fenty Beauty and Savage X Fenty. She has not commented on her apparent U-turn. Her last album was Anti, released in 2016.
