Maroon 5’s eminent singer Adam Levine is taking heat for sharing pro-BLM Instagram posts after Maroon 5 played the 2019 Super Bowl halftime show. Several top Black acts boycotted performing, due to the NFL’s treatment Colin Kaepernick.
When Super Bowl LIII went down in Atlanta in 2019, there were a number of Black artists who allegedly turned down the chance to perform at halftime. They did it to be in support of quarterback Colin Kaepernick, was still unsigned by a team after starting the “taking a knee” racial injustice protests in 2016. Adam Levine and his band Maroon 5 ended up taking the high-profile gig, and now he’s getting heat for being hypocritical by posting anti-racism and pro-Black Lives Matter messages to his Instagram. One man has started a petition for people to comment in the41-year-old’s IG posts until he apologizes for accepting the Super Bowl offer amid the NFL’s mistreatment of Kaep and other Black players…which the league has now apologized for.
Durham, NC resident Vic Oyedeji started the original Change.org petition in 2019, asking Maroon 5 to drop out of their Super Bowl performing appearance. He wrote at the time, “The band has a chance to stand on the right side of history. If they don’t, they will be remembered for choosing to side with the NFL over its players,” and noted that, “Colin Kaepernick has sacrificed his NFL career to call out violent racism in America.” The petition accumulated over 113,000 signatures.
Rihanna turned down the Super Bowl
On the other hand, Rihanna admitted to Vogue in Oct. 2019 that she “absolutely” turned down the Super Bowl halftime gig in support of Kaepernick. “I couldn’t dare do that,” she told the publication. “For what? Who gains from that? Not my people. I just couldn’t be a sell-out. I couldn’t be an enabler. There are 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.”
Other artists including JAY-Z and Cardi B had also been saying that they wouldn’t perform at the Super Bowl in solidarity with Kaepernick’s fight for racial justice. Jay Z rapped about it in his 2018 song “Apesh*t,” with the lines, “I said no to the Super Bowl/ You need me, I don’t need you/ Every night we in the endzone/ Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.” Cardi, gave a shout-out to Colin in a 2017 VMAs speech, saying “Colin Kaepernick…As long as you kneel with us, we gonna stand for you, baby.” She confirmed to TMZ in Feb. 2018 that she had turned down a Super Bowl performance offer and wouldn’t participate until an NFL team had signed the quarterback.
