Let’s go back in time.
We’re at the beginning of the Obama administration, Lady Gaga is still the biggest name in music, and the world of pop is laying the foundations for the 2010s obsession with “poptimism”. Amongst the glitter of culture, one woman is preparing for her big return to music. After a disaster flop two years previously, Jennifer Lopez is on song two of her latest campaign for America’s ears – and hearts.
In 2009, Lopez was entering her 40s. This is the age where the entertainment industry truly stops pretending to care about women, and she was no exception. Having spent two years focusing on less strenuous money-making ventures following the birth of twins, her glorious return just highlighted how out-of-step she had become. Nothing screamed “down with the kids” like a second-rate Ciara ripoff, as was the case with October’s promo single ‘Fresh Out The Oven’ (of course, featuring Pitbull). It would fail to chart, but was also barely promoted.
But with the second single for her upcoming album, she was making a splash. As she strutted on stage at the 2009 ‘American Music Awards’ in prize fighter drag, she had something to prove. The choreography was some of the most intense of her career, her gaze was penetrating. Not even a tumble of a human pyramid stopped her. It did, however, highlight the biggest problem of the promo campaign.
‘Louboutins’ was not a hit and quickly got outshined by the minor fall.
I don’t think you can understate just how devastating the failure of this one single was to her music career as it stood. Originally produced for Brandy Norwood before her deal with Epic Records fell through, it was the latest in a career length standard of Lopez profiting off of other artist’s work. The track came from hitmaking legends The Dream and Tricky Stewart, who were on a winning streak across several of her contemporaries.
Real money was invested in the campaign and performances, with the month-long promotion cycle being surprisingly aggressive. Three televised performances had been pushed out to the public in prime spots. A music video was planned for January of 2010, with Christian Louboutin promising to personally devote himself to it creatively. But instead of riding out this clear failure, in February of 2010 it was confirmed that she had parted ways from Epic, after a decade of partnership under Sony. This should have been the end. What could J.Lo offer in the 2010s?
Let’s really think about this. Jennifer Lopez is not a vessel for personal, revealing, or evocative music. The lyrics she (mostly) sings are about as broad as dance pop can get. Her voice is admittedly weak and often unpleasant when treated without care by producers. Whatever skills she offers as a performer are better utilised in film because they’re pretty much all physical. Sure, she can emote, but not particularly well in song. Except that misses one important factor. You don’t become the type of star Jennifer Lopez is by letting something as silly as skill or talent get in the way of your career.
Working backwards, you have to ask why 2007’s ‘Brave’ was such a monumental disaster? Yes, it’s not a good record, but none of Lopez’s discography are any sort of unique or compelling bodies of work. She’s a singles artist who should have been right at home in the dance music that had begun to dominate the charts and radio. The trouble was that she couldn’t really sell it.
Look at her competition in 2007/2008 in terms of dance music. It’s Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Rihanna, Fergie, and a lot more people with distinct tones and vocal styles. They might not all be the strongest singers in pop music, but there’s nothing generic about how the women in pop sounded. Even at their least invested, they dominate the sound of their music and stand out amidst increasingly ostentatious production. Personality first, everything else second.
Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies (Ring On It)’ is the du jour example of this dichotomy. That instrumental is insane, an unhinged layering of sounds that would suffocate a weaker voice. But with a powerhouse vocalist with the ability to play amongst the chaos, she made a hit. This was a song that no one else could pull off as effectively. The same way that ‘Gimme More’ wouldn’t work nearly as well without Spears’ distinct vocal patterns, or how Fergie managed to carve out space for herself amongst will.i.am’s often unrelenting beats. It takes a certain level of skill and personality to make these unrelenting beats work for you.
J.Lo doesn’t do that. She can’t. Listen to ‘Brave’, and you get a mix of songs that range from Ciara, to Christina Milian, to late career Janet Jackson, to Ashanti, all of which sound bizarre in her tense yelp of a voice. They all have the same feel tonally as Taylor Swift attempting to make an Ava Max song. ‘Louboutins’ suffered from the same sense of anonymity, but what made the earlier album so much worse was how unrelenting it was. It sounded like a woman yelling in a car mechanic’s shed mid-service.
Clang!
Bang!
You’re doing it well!
HORNY HORNS!
Previous outings for Lopez had been just as fraught, with 2005’s ‘Rebirth’ signalling a shift in sound that you wouldn’t recognise if not announced. The lead single ‘Get Right’ charted just enough to avoid complete disaster, but the record as a whole was a clear signal that the situation was getting dire. As pop music got increasingly aggressive, she had struggled to establish a presence. It must have been frustrating, given that this very facelessness had been to her benefit on a few years prior.
The story of Jennifer Lopez moving from B list film stardom to B list pop stardom is forever and always told in the context of Mariah Carey. That was who she was compared to immediately following the interest from Sony, who she was styled after aesthetically (seriously, her first two album cycles look like rejected ‘Rainbow’ concepts), the one whose music was being directly pulled, down to the Ja Rule feature. For those more in the hole with this, you’d also have heard of the situation with Chante Moore, who claims her song ‘If I Gave Love’ was directly stolen by Lopez’s then-boyfriend Diddy for her lead single ‘If You Had My Love’. Or maybe you’ve seen the videos calling out the voices of Ashanti and Christina Milian popping up on songs like ‘I’m Real (Remix)’ and ‘Play’.
I’m not even sure who’s on the chorus of the original ‘I’m Real’, but it doesn’t sound like Ms Lopez either!
That lack of sonic identity in this very literal sense (allegedly, so don’t bloody sue me) was a blessing and a curse. On one hand, throwing herself into this role allowed her to reach unfathomable success extremely quickly and ensured support from the people that mattered. Tommy Mottola picking her as his weapon of revenge (again, allegedly) made her the pick of the litter. Her first single flew to number one, and her next three hits to chart at that spot were all basically the same song, purportedly copying a formula Carey’s ex-husband had lifted from the Glitter soundtrack. Even if not, there was nothing original about a pop girl singing beside a rapper.
Lopez’s last top ten hit of the decade was a feature on LL Cool J’s single ‘Control Myself’, the second single from his 2006 album ‘Control Myself’. Featuring breathy vocals and presented in one of the weaker Hype Williams music videos, it’s pretty standard fare for the duo. But what stands out here was how it charted so well. Initially dropping out after an eleven week run that didn’t light any fires, the sudden decision to drop it as a digital download two months after the official release caused it to re-enter the charts at number four, earning a few more weeks of airplay. It felt like the end of an era for both, and considering the circumstances of her career a few years later, you might have heard this on the radio and assumed she was done for good.
Returning to 2010, what you’re left with is a pop star who has a backlog of hits that she can barely claim, a career faltering at a point where the industry stops giving second chances, and no label. That last part was rectified quickly, because established names are a hot commodity even at 40, but the biggest problem was her. Nobody was sure how an aging pop star with a weak voice could fit into pop.
Wait a minute…
‘On The Floor’ is theoretically an extension of what Lopez had been doing on ‘Brave’. A thumping club track that trades in the softer side of her persona for something distinctly sharper and shoutier. If that album didn’t work, why should this one?
Well…this song actually sounded good, so we can start there. ‘On The Floor’ is one of the best produced dance-pop singles to hit the charts in the post-Gaga pop landscape of the early 2010s, with the RedOne production stamp to add legitimacy. But more than that, it worked with Lopez’s weaknesses and either obscured them, or made them seem like strengths.
Weak vocals? She can just speak the verses!
Aging out of pop? The club scene doesn’t care!
No personality? Bring in Pitbull!
‘On The Floor’ was the first in her career in that it feels distinctly J.Lo. She sounds right at home. There is no clear lifting going on, and even the more obvious influences for the production feel more like a pop diva responding to trends. There’s something Madonna-esque about the approach.
Ageism in pop music is a very real thing, but there’s this inverse phenomenon where older women in pop can get a second wind if the music bangs hard enough. As long as you’re not too visibly aged, you just need a real hit. Cher did it, Madonna did it, even SIA did it.
EDM as a genre provided the answer for Lopez. A way to earn a hit, because music had finally returned to a sound that complimented her. Much like how her nasal serenading on tracks like ‘All I Have’ a decade prior had positioned her as an every-girl, her newly layered crooning on songs like ‘I’m Into You (featuring Lil Wayne)’ provided some weight to her attempts at bravado. ‘Love?’, which had started out so poorly with its two promotional singles, ended up being a decent second peak for her.
She would never revisit the commercial peaks of the early 2000s, but this is the album that cemented her legacy. For better or for worse, she had ascended to a type of pop icon that you cannot get rid of. Her next album spawned a short top-20 single with Iggy Azalea, and we’re in a weirdly uncommitted promotional cycle for her ninth studio album, a sequel album to the not-very-good 2002 record ‘This Is Me…Then’. It’s called ‘This Is Me…Now’. The promotional video is hilarious.
The real question with Jennifer Lopez in 2023, as it is with every pop star, is “why?”. But unlike a Jesy Nelson, you don’t really question what the label saw in her, you’re asking what about her makes people dislike her. I think what people are responding to so negatively about her career is this idea that longevity is earned through merit. With her thin, ugly voice and scandal-filled discography, Lopez doesn’t feel like she’s “earned it”. But that’s an unfair assessment.
Where she is now is basically where she was in 2010. And maybe she’s about to reinvent the wheel again by attaching herself to the rising trend of dance music. I mean, she’s arguably better set up for that at 50 then she was at 40. But if not, this is a career worth knowing about, even if much of the music is bad. Jennifer Lopez earned a spot in two decades of music history, which not everybody can claim.
Stans love a villain to rage against. Ageism will be ignored if you’re able to keep up some momentum. And, if nothing else, those videos about Ashanti will keep both of them relevant for years to come.