![]() It’s not one of her better songs, the production is energetic but quite run-of-the-mill and the chorus is just a touch too repetitive and it feels like it runs about 30 seconds too long despite clocking in at well under 4 minutes. (In America she scored a #1 out the gate with IYHML, and this song peaked at a more modest #3). Such was her level of celebrity by 2001 that it felt only right and proper that she be anointed with a #1 single, which this song duly delivered her. Having come up through dancing (a fun early appearance – background in a Samantha Fox video!), TV and eventually movies, she segued seemingly effortlessly into pop music with the slinky If You Had My Love and the euphoric Waiting For Tonight, to my mind still two of her best records. But pop as brand-extension seems to have reached a peak around the early 00s, and it’s hard to think of anybody who practiced it as effectively as Jennifer Lopez. « RUI DA SILVA ft CASSANDRA – “Touch Me” LIMP BIZKIT – “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” » CommentsĮver since they started putting pictures on record sleeves, pop music has been an exercise in branding. It’s the paradox of J-Lo: her records act out a struggle between insecurity over her realness, and a will to adapt and entertain. And if that fails, there’s some crashing Cheiron-esque boom-beats at the start, and a parping synth-brass breakdown: everywhere you listen, this record is doing its best to grab you. Never mind that it doesn’t fit the theme, it turns a lyrically somewhat pat song into one with more dramatic kick. “Jenny From The Block”, for instance, succeeds because it backs up ridiculous lyrics not with grimy, ground-level beats but with a super-infectious flute sample.Īnd “Love Don’t Cost A Thing” is just as splashy and eager to please, a blustering take on the Destiny’s Child sound of 1999, fake harpsichord runs all over the place and Lopez adopting the conspiratorial, you-won’t-believe-this tone of “Bills Bills Bills” et al on the verses to build some tension. Instead their quality is down to her flexibility, a drive to bring in the crowds no matter what she’s doing. And this is the strange flipside of J-Lo’s obsession with her own authenticity: the actual records she was making are all rather good, but not because of their street credentials. Diddy, her ex.) It’s a more generous sentiment, you might say, but an easier one too. (The press assumed she was having a dig at P. It sets out its pitch as a kind of opposite to “No Scrubs” – that single flintily diagnosed deadbeat men as a drag on women’s chances of bettering themselves, but J-Lo waves such concerns away: it’s the heart that counts. So “Love Don’t Cost A Thing” doesn’t just dive into R&B’s ongoing debate on romance and wealth, it’s an instalment in Lopez’ didactic campaign to prove how down-to-earth she is. Being real? “To me it’s like breathing”, J-Lo trills, while around her hip-hop crew The LOX rap their career into the ground. Rule’s guest spot was on a remix of the bluntly titled “I’m Real” (”The game done chose me”, offers Lopez), and the theme reached its peak on the much-derided “Jenny From The Block” – the very definition of protesting too much. J-Lo did this partly by showing – with a revolving door of rap collaborators, most prominently Ja Rule – but also by telling. It was a line of attack that apparently bugged Lopez, since she countered it at exhausting length, with a rash of songs designed to prove her authenticity, her street roots and connections, and her refusal to let money define her. The obvious and unkind rejoinder would be that she was a dilettante, her pop career a rich woman’s hobby. J-Lo is the pop incarnation of that very 00s figure, the flexible worker – pivoting, reskilling, and relaunching herself across a variety of disciplines with general success. For J-Lo to fit so smoothly into millennial pop’s identity parade when her peers were far younger and with fewer built-up associations suggests unusual dexterity. ![]() ![]() You can imagine a number of already-famous women deciding, at 30, that they’d like to get into music. In fact the main thing that sets Jennifer Lopez apart is how versatile she is – she’s shifted between film star, pop star (in Anglo and Latin markets), and TV personality and done solidly well at all of them. ![]() If that seems unfair, it might be because her skills run a lot wider than music. J-Lo, I’d say, is one of these performers. A track by them will tell you more about its year than any of its more idiosyncratic, or better, peers. Every era of pop has artists who work as a kind of fossil record – they may never put their name behind a great single, but their career is a useful indicator of pop’s shifting baselines and aesthetic whims.
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