Jennifer Lopez - "This is Me...Now"
This could be the last J-Lo album, and that's...unfortunate...
Look out, fellow 90s kids! This one hurts: J-Lo is 54 years old now.
One of the most influential pop acts of the early 00s and the star of the 1997 Selena biopic, Lopez is a legend. Of course, nobody reading this (unless a Zoomer stumbled in) needs to be told as much. Whether you liked her music or not, Lopez was a household name for many years following her debut album in 1999.
This is Me…Now is her ninth studio album, and breaks a decade-long drought where we got zero new music from J-Lo. Which is kinda wild. Of course, at the same time that her last album came out, Lopez was also finalizing a divorce on a marriage of ten years. Considering that the marriage happened five months after her high-profile breakup with Ben Affleck in 2004, which Lopez called her “first real heartbreak”, it’s somewhat impressive that the Marc Anthony rebound lasted as long as it did.
With all of this context, it isn’t surprising that Lopez took some time to work on herself and raise her kids following a divorce. But in the intervening decade – during the pandemic, no less – J-Lo reconnected with Affleck, and they finally married in July 2022, twenty years after they initially started dating the first time.
Lopez has stated publicly that This is Me…Now is, at its core, an album dedicated to and in celebration of her relationship with Ben Affleck. At first glance, you might suspect that the title is simply a statement of self in this new phase of her life; at second, you might notice the direct play on the title of her third album, This is Me…Then. But it runs even deeper, as …Then was also heavily centered on her relationship with Ben Affleck, and …Now is intended as a better-late-than-never direct sequel now that they’re back together and writing the next part of their story together.
Naturally, most of the 13 tracks are love songs of one form or another, and right in the middle of the album is “Dear Ben, Pt II”, a song directed right at Affleck, just as the album’s predecessor contained the original “Dear Ben”.
The album is a weird bridge between decades, as much of the core is reminiscent of the kind of Pop and R&B blend you’d hear in the early 00s, but there’s also a touch of modernization. Every track has a catchy beat or production element, and J-Lo still sounds great. Yet, despite all of this, the album still feels largely just…generic. Even trying to pay close attention to a song, I find five minutes later that the whole experience has just vanished from my mind as though it never happened.
The music sounds good, but it’s all gloss. Nothing sticks. On both listens, I found myself wondering what my actual takeaways are. I enjoy it while it plays, but cannot for the life of me recall any of the melodies that, at the time, I thought were really catchy, with the sole exception, perhaps, of “Midnight Trip to Vegas”, which is a cute story about an absurdly wealthy couple taking a spontaneous trip to Vegas in the middle of the night.
Overall, it’s not a bad album – honestly, it’s good! It just ultimately also rings hollow.
Rating: Yellow