Lil Wayne has promised to never do the Super Bowl halftime show after the NFL pᴀssed him over for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans.
Wayne, a native of the Louisiana city, believed he would be given the chance to perform a hometown show at the Superdome. The honor was ultimately bestowed to Kendrick Lamar, who produced what some fans called the ‘worst halftime show ever.’
Regardless, Wayne – whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. – has said in a new interview that he won’t be doing any future halftime shows.
‘They stole that feeling,’ he told Rolling Stone. ‘I don’t want to do it. It was perfect.’
After Lamar was announced as the performer for Super Bowl LIX, the NFL sent him an apology letter, according to his good friend Skip Bayless.
However, Wayne did not watch Lamar and SZA perform during the Chiefs-Eagles interval.
Lil Wayne was devastated after not being chosen to perform in his home city of New Orleans
Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl performance did not go down well with many NFL fans
Lamar divided Super Bowl fans with a halftime show that included his Drake diss track
‘Every time I looked, it was nothing that made me want to go inside and see what was going on,’ he said.
Wayne previously opened up on the painful snub in an Instagram Live video.
‘I blame myself for not being mentally prepared for a letdown and for just automatically mentally putting myself in that position,’ he said. ‘
‘I thought there was nothing better than that spot, that stage, that platform, in my city. So it hurt, it hurt a whole lot.’
He later told Bayless on his eponymous show that he had spoken with Lamar and wished him ‘all the best.’
Still, the hometown snub was compounded by the fact that, as he told Rolling Stone, he was ‘part of things I’ve never been a part of’ before the game.
‘Like [Michael] Rubin’s all-white parties. I’m doing s*** with Tom Brady. That was all for that. You ain’t never seen me in them types of venues. I ain’t Drake. I ain’t out there smiling like that everywhere. I’m in the [studio], smokin’ and recording.’
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The ‘A Milli’ artist stepped back into the spotlight soon after as he performed on the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary special.
Lamar’s halftime show reportedly drew an average audience of 133.5million viewers – more than any other halftime show in history.
But the performance – which also featured cameos from Samuel L. Jackson and Serena Williams – was widely panned by viewers.
Among the complaints for the performance was Lamar’s focus on his feud with Drake, Williams’ ‘crip-walking’ during the performance and apparent anti-American’ themes, as TMZ reported.
Lamar performed his hit Drake diss ‘Not Like Us’, which has been the subject of a defamation lawsuit from Drake .
It refers to the Canadian as a ‘certified pedophile,’ though Lamar did not rap those words on stage in February.