Music assessment
This Is Me…Now
ICYMI: Jennifer Lopez is madly in love.
The multihyphenate has confirmed time and time once more that she continues to be sizzling for Ben Affleck 20 years after their first go-around.
So do we actually want a baker’s dozen of songs about Bennifer 2.0?
Effectively, apparently J.Lo thinks so, as her first album in a decade, “This Is Me…Now” (out Friday), is completely about their rekindled relationship, from discovering their manner again to one another in 2021 to eloping in Las Vegas the next yr.
“Now” is the sequel to “This Is Me…Then,” which Lopez launched in 2002 on the top of the media circus surrounding Bennifer 1.0, however it pales compared to the hook-laden album that gave us “Jenny From the Block,” “I’m Glad,” “All I Have” and so many different classics.
To place it bluntly, it’s as watery because the iced espresso Affleck picks up from Dunkin’ each morning.
Whereas pop powerhouses like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Woman Gaga reinvent themselves with every period of latest music, Lopez is slowed down in her glory days, recycling uninspired sounds and tales from a quarter-century in the past.
From the leap, the singer, 54, reminds us on the album’s title observe that she “took some lefts” earlier than touchdown proper again in Affleck’s arms.
“Take me as I’m / And I’ll take you as you’re,” she warbles. “And we’ll construct this life collectively / I discovered my taking pictures star.”
Lopez stresses but once more on the feel-good single “Can’t Get Sufficient” that she’s “nonetheless in love” with Affleck, 51, and tells haters on the hip-hop-leaning “This Time Round” that nothing can “break” the ability couple now that they obtained “a do-over.”
“We gon’ do that s–t for the remainder of our lives,” she intones on the latter.
At instances, the Grammy nominee appears to be in a one-woman race to out-cringe herself lyrically. (She did release “Booty” in spite of everything.)
On the ’00s throwback “Not Going Anyplace,” she raps of her and the Oscar winner’s failed first try at love, “S–t was on the rocks just like the ‘Harlem Shake.’”
And on the melodic “Biggest Love Story By no means Instructed,” she moans about getting down and soiled along with her husband, “Lacking your physique / Climbing on prime of me / Slipping within me / Approach that I journey it / Our bodies aligning.” Yuck.
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There’s some magnificence among the many insanity, although.
The sluggish burn “Damaged Like Me” is J.Lo at her rawest; the ache in her voice is palpable as she displays on choosing up the items of her damaged marriage to Marc Anthony earlier than reuniting with Affleck.
“Two infants at dwelling / Mama needed to be robust,” she sings of her and Anthony’s now-15-year-old twins, Max and Emme. “In a battle for love / In a conflict of my very own.”
As soon as Bennifer’s love story comes full circle, although, Lopez is a lady reborn.
The penultimate “Midnight Journey to Vegas” chronicles how the stress of wedding ceremony planning (“We’re drowning in orchid preparations, clothes and pastries”) led the “Gigli” co-stars to “do one thing loopy” and rush to the world-famous Little White Wedding ceremony Chapel to say their “I dos.”
If solely Lopez have been that spontaneous with branching out of her consolation zone.
