Where Did It All Go Wrong for J.Lo?

In February, Jennifer Lopez released a bundle of multimedia projects that were each part of a larger statement—arguably, a misguided one—about the power of love or something. One of those was This Is Me … Now, a very cheesy and otherwise unremarkable late-career pop album. The other was This Is Me … Now: A Love Story, a loosely biographical, somewhat egomaniacal adaptation of the album into a blockbuster musical full of astrological melodrama, flashy choreography, and celebrity cameos. Finally, a couple of weeks later, Lopez released The Greatest Love Story Never Told, a behind-the-scenes documentary that’s chiefly about the making of This Is Me … Now: A Love Story but is more notable for its awkwardly invasive glimpses into J.Lo’s famed romance with a dutifully supportive but quite visibly mortified Ben Affleck.

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This is all, taken together, as overproduced and exasperating as it sounds. Each project has been met with mixed-to-bad reviews and general mockery on social media. J.Lo herself admitted to Variety that she made and self-financed the musical, to the tune of $20 million, even though everyone in her creative orbit, including coproducer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas and castmate Jane Fonda, warned her about the risk of further overexposure of her relationship with Affleck. But J.Lo persisted, and the result is a roundly uncanny production that’s distressingly reminiscent of Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All by Myself but also James Cameron’s Avatar and also Paul Hunter’s music video for “Wild Wild West.” Fat Joe plays J.Lo’s therapist, and Jane Fonda plays Sagittarius, in the most cringeworthy release involving either Lopez or Affleck since—too fittingly, really—Gigli. Ticket sales for the tour to promote This Is Me … Now have been exceptionally weak; J.Lo has hastily rebranded the concert series as a greatest hits tour.

The overexposure of pop stars, to a fault, is routine. We know perhaps a bit too much about J.Lo’s pop contemporaries, too, and look: It’s not like Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake haven’t also pushed their own post-peak vanity projects to weak receptions in recent years. But J.Lo has, for much of her career, been a curiously unsympathetic figure, a stone-cold climber whose missteps draw a great deal of schadenfreude and now something of a backlash.

Lopez has long been a more divisive figure than meets the eye. This was the crux of the drama a couple of months ago on Saturday Night Live, concerning host Ayo Edebiri, costar of The Bear, and musical guest Lopez, as the latter was promoting her aforementioned projects a couple of weeks before their release dates. A day before the taping in New York, TMZ resurfaced some old footage of Edebiri, as a guest on Laci Mosley’s podcast, Scam Goddess, saying Lopez “can’t sing” and describing her musical career as “one long scam.” These were jokes, in one sense—a comedic actor skewering a pop star in a harmlessly petty conversation on a podcast brought to you by Team Coco—but then, yes, actually, this has always been the shadow discourse about J.Lo. She can’t sing, and not in the normal way that a lot of pop stars slathered in Auto-Tune can’t sing; J.Lo goes so far as to hide behind uncredited vocals from other singers, from Ashanti (“I’m Real,” “Ain’t It Funny”) to Meghan Trainor (“Ain’t Your Mama”). These criticisms are common enough that Lopez, commenting on the footage of Edebiri, told Variety that she’s indeed “heard similar things said about me throughout my career.” While Lopez would publicly insist that Edebiri’s comments were water under the bridge, Edebiri led off her SNL appearance with a sketch referencing her criticism of Lopez, in a half-kidding ritual self-humiliation. This was Lorne Michaels making the most of an awkward situation, sure, but also it felt like Lopez putting Edebiri in her place, even if she wasn’t directly responsible for the sketch’s development. Lopez also made a point of telling Variety that Edebiri apologized to her “with tears in her eyes.”

Such is the role Lopez never sought but has played on and off for decades now: J.Lo as pop villain—or, if not quite villain, a sort of hapless foil. Her famous feud with Mariah Carey in the early 2000s gave us the iconic quote from Carey after she was asked about J.Lo: “I don’t know her.” This was a rivalry born out of Carey’s divorce from her label boss, Tommy Mottola at Sony, who reportedly led the label to aggressively promote Lopez and scornfully sabotage the career of his ex-wife. Mottola and the tabloids pitted these two women against each other, and while the rivalry never escalated into any direct confrontation or explicit denunciation, J.Lo has always come across as the loser—a woman out of her depth.

J.Lo got her start as a Fly Girl on In Living Color and as the breakout star of Gregory Nava’s charming biopic Selena. This was the 1990s. These were, in retrospect, the only years when Lopez was so uncontroversially beloved, before her disastrous involvement with Puff Daddy, before her cold war with Mariah, and before her multimedia reach, far exceeding her grasp, could culminate in something as unwieldy and off-putting as This Is Me … Now: A Love Story. Much of the cynicism about J.Lo over the years, up to its latest climax, concerns her particular proportion of fame and talent. There’s the sense that even the heights of her own career don’t quite compare to those of her contemporaries or earn her the same sort of everlasting goodwill. Mariah Carey was arguably the most formidable female pop singer of her generation, with a fearsome command of five octaves, while Jennifer Lopez was a great dancer with a relatively weak singing voice, evident to anyone who has ever intently listened to the chorus of “Waiting for Tonight.” This contrast was always a bit damning, even if the underlying rivalry was false and, in any case, wasn’t J.Lo’s fault or problem. But J.Lo is a talented entertainer, undeniably, even as she struggles to narrow her ambitions in response to that pesky, inevitable question: talented at what, exactly?

This Is Me … Now: A Love Story possibly would’ve worked better as a back-to-basics dance showcase for Lopez, a savvy capitalization on the goodwill from her impressive performance alongside Shakira at Super Bowl LIV. But, of course, it had to be an overwrought showcase for J.Lo as an actor, singer, writer, producer, and lover, too. “Bennifer” is a tabloid romance for the ages, sure, but also the most consistently overexposed aspect of J.Lo’s legacy and one that’s dramatically at odds with her posturing as “Jenny from the block,” when she is, at this point, so clearly and thoroughly a creature of Hollywood, subject of so much resentment, exactly as Fonda warned her.