By the time Jennifer Lopez recorded her 2002 album This Is Me... Then, a new world was at the doorstep of every celebrity — the days of artistes recording an album, posing for a magazine and doing a few concerts were over. They were being born into a world of overexposure, one in which they had to be at the beck and call of celebrity websites, show up on morning shows and complete exhaustive promotion campaigns.
Thomas D. Mottola, the then chairman and chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, had a great idea — give Lopez a dash of middle-class respectability, make her appear as an ordinary girl at heart and not be “fooled by the rocks” that she has because she was still “Jenny from the block”.
That time flies can be seen how Lopez has navigated her career over three decades, yet she is as relevant culturally at age 53 as she was when making films like Selena and Out of Sight or recording albums like J.Lo and This Is Me... Then. Except the fact that J.Lo is now J.Aff, nothing has changed as Lopez remains as much an underdog as she is an icon. No wonder she has recorded the sequel to her 2002 album and is calling it This Is Me... Now, which is set to release next year.
“Twenty years ago, I fell in love with the love of my life. I was working on an album and it was called This Is Me… Then. It was all about capturing that moment in time. Now, the most amazing, incredible, unbelievable thing has happened. The reason we’re here is because I want to capture this moment in time because it is even better than the first time,” she has told Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, who is somewhat like the Oprah Winfrey of the music world — the man with whom singers share their secrets.
The tumultuous era
Lopez is someone out of a Twilight Zone story, leading an unbelievable life. “It is a little bit like the Twilight Zone. It doesn’t happen. That album, This Is Me... Then, really captured a moment in time where I fell in love with the love of my life. It’s all right there on the record. I didn’t even realise what was happening and what I was doing. It was just every day going from the set to the recording studio, doing the thing, being in love, him coming into the studio, writing I’m Glad and going: ‘This reminds me of....’ You know what I mean! Me tweaking the lyrics with him. Every single song that we wrote there, me writing Dear Ben; it was such a special moment in time to have captured,” said Lopez.
Jennifer Lopez with Ben Affleck
This was a tumultuous era for Lopez. She met Ben Affleck while filming the box-office flop Gigli in spring 2002 at a time when her marriage to choreographer Cris Judd was faltering. She had filed for divorce in July 2002 and by November her engagement to Affleck was announced. November 2002 will also be remembered for Affleck starring in the video for Jenny From The Block, kissing her bikini-clad bottom. Here was a Latina bombshell with fur coats and high heels and then there was this square-jawed movie star. She was from Bronx. He was from Boston. What’s wrong with that? Before that came the shooting of the film Jersey Girl, the director of which, Kevin Smith, probably coined the term ‘Bennifer’. Engagement gets confirmed, details get spilled during an interview with Diane Sawyer as part of ABC’s PrimeTime: Special Edition and in less than a year their wedding gets pushed back and by January 2004 it was all over.
“Our relationship was written about so much that it just alienated people. I feel like a guy who is almost at the finish line. Then I’ll sort of disappear for a good long time, and not be… this person,” Affleck told Rolling Stone in April 2004.
‘Love is a great thing’
True love, of course, never dies. After a wait of several years, Bennifer was back in July 2021 and a year later they made it to Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas while a formal wedding took place on August 20, 2022.
“I decided to call it This Is Me... Then, this moment in time was captured of finding your soulmate in that time and it’s all there. When I listen to the lyrics now, I didn’t even realise I was writing some of our story that would happen, which was sick still. Some of the records on there, which were more obvious about Ben, but even records that you were like: ‘That’s a breakup record.’ I didn’t even realise that it was prophetic in a weird way,” Lopez tells Lowe during their Apple Music 1 conversation.
Mrs Affleck believes that her husband is her biggest fan. After getting back with Affleck, she decided to change her name and the announcement first came via her subscription-only On the JLo newsletter. “Love is a great thing, maybe the best of things — and worth waiting for,” she wrote, signing off: “With love, Mrs. Jennifer Lynn Affleck.” Although many have wanted to see a Ben Lopez but whether or not to take a spouse’s name is a personal choice. J.Lo., the brand, remains strong.
“He loves that album. He loves that music. He knows all of the words. You know what I mean? It’s crazy. He also was with me while I was creating it. You know what it is to make an album. You’re listening to the demos in the car. You’re listening to the mixes. ‘I wrote this today. What do you think of this?’ It was that over and over again for two years while we were together. He knows it so well and he loves it so much. He’s my biggest fan, which is awesome, and supporter. When he came back into my life again, the same thing happened where I felt so inspired and so overtaken with emotion that it was just pouring out of me,” Lopez has told Zane Lowe.
So far, Lopez has sold 80 million records with 15 billion streams, starred in nearly 40 films, grossing $3 billion, garnered more than 350 million social media followers and generated over $5 billion in consumer sales as a brand, the 2022 documentary Jennifer Lopez: Halftime reminds us. “My whole life I’ve been battling and battling to be heard, to be seen, to be taken seriously,” she has said earlier. From being a dancer (she was in Janet Jackson’s 1993 video for That’s the Way Love Goes), she became an actor and then a singer, who ultimately has become a global icon.
The tabloid culture of the 2000s destroyed her first relationship with Affleck but the two of them continued to have very successful professional careers.
“It was a new thing and it destroyed us. That was part of what destroyed us was the outside energy that was coming at us. And we loved each other. It was hard. It felt, at times, unfair, but neither one of us is that person to be like, woe is me. So we were like, well, we just got to dust it off and keep it moving. I think, in the weirdest way, that it motivated both of us to then become and do the things that we wound up doing, which is going into hyper-gear. He went into hyper-gear and I went into hyper-gear. But not together. We had to do it separately. He went on to start directing, win his Oscar, do his second Oscar, do his thing where people had written him off in a way. The same thing with me. It was just like people were like, ‘Her music career’s over. She’s this, she’s that.’ I wasn’t getting movies. I had to power my way back. I had to work and work. I got divorced and I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll do the reality show. I’ll do the television show. I’ll do the single. I’ll do this.’ And it was just, ‘Okay, I’m going to go on tour for the first time.’ It fueled us in a weird way that we felt we had to prove ourselves again,” Lopez has told Apple Music 1.
Ultimately, of course, both found peace with themselves and with each other. Meanwhile, Lopez knows she’s in the kick-the-glass-ceiling business and she continues to make bold moves, each one coming with an air kiss and a wave.