Jay-Z: Why we sat for anthem

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

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

“It actually wasn’t — sorry,” said the music mogul. “It really wasn’t.” He said that if he had 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.”

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. “I’m cool with it! 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? We had a bunch of sound. So the sound was done for TV. I had to explain to them [that] as an artist, if you don’t feel the music, you can’t really reach that level ... It was a big struggle to get all this sound.”

He added, “So the whole time we’re sitting there, we’re talking about the performance, and then right after that, Demi 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 just . . .’. I’m like, ‘What?’ ”

Jay-Z added, “If you look at the video, you will see that it’s just a thing . . . it just happened . . . If you look at the stage and the artists that we chose — Colombian [ Shakira] and Puerto Rican [ Jennifer Lopez] . . . I didn’t have to make a silent protest.”