Ceci est la traduction adaptée d’un article de Nancy Dillon, originalement publié par Rolling Stone le 4 septembre 2025. Nous republions l'article originalement intitulé Justin Bieber Surprise Announces ‘Swag II’ avec la permission de son autrice. Notez que certaines subtilités et nuances peuvent différer de la version originale.
Justin Bieber a annoncé la sortie d’un nouvel album, Swag II, qui paraîtra ce soir à minuit.
Le chanteur a dévoilé la nouvelle jeudi sur Instagram, reprenant la stratégie employée pour Swag. Il a publié une série de photos montrant des bâtiments et des panneaux publicitaires où le titre Swag II est projeté, avant de révéler une pochette entièrement rose, sans autre élément que le nom de l’album. Certains panneaux numériques affichent aussi une image de Bieber avec sa femme, Hailey, et leur fils.
Pour l’instant, il n’a ni partagé la liste des pièces ni confirmé d’éventuelles collaborations. Si l’annonce suit le même modèle que celle de Swag, plus de détails devraient être révélés progressivement sur Instagram au cours de la journée.
Sorti en juillet, Swag était son premier album en quatre ans et avait été dévoilé par surprise. Réalisé avec des producteurs comme Dijon, Mk.gee et Carter Lang, il réunissait des invités tels que Sexyy Red, Cash Cobain, Gunna, Lil B, Druski et d’autres. L’album abordait la vie familiale de Bieber et ses hauts et bas. Il est entré en deuxième position au Billboard 200, mettant fin à une série de six albums numéro un, mais a connu la plus grosse semaine de streaming de la carrière du chanteur avec près de 200 millions d’écoutes à la demande. Son extrait principal, Daisies, avait également débuté au deuxième rang du Hot 100.
Depuis Justice en 2021, Bieber avait traversé une période difficile marquée par un diagnostic du syndrome de Ramsay Hunt qui avait forcé l’arrêt puis l’annulation de sa tournée, ainsi que par sa séparation d’avec Scooter Braun, son manager de longue date.
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.