Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez

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Essential Albums

  • Como Ama una Mujer
    Como Ama una Mujer
    Como Ama una Mujer

    2007

  • This Is Me...Then (20th Anniversary Edition)
    This Is Me...Then (20th Anniversary Edition)
    This Is Me...Then (20th Anniversary Edition)

    In 2002, Jennifer Lopez released her third album This Is Me...Then, a lovelorn record that captured the superstar at a crucial moment in her life. While its lead single was the mission statement “Jenny From the Block,” other tracks, like the glittery “I'm Glad” and the heartfelt “Dear Ben,” directly addressed her relationship with Ben Affleck, which was burning up the tabloids at that point. “This Is Me...Then really captured a moment in time where I fell in love with the love of my life,” Lopez tells Apple Music. “It's all right there on the record. I didn't even realize 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. It was such a special moment in time to have captured.” The inspiration for the album title came from a lengthy conversation with Affleck while the two were at the centre of an early-2000s paparazzi frenzy in Philadelphia, where they were filming the Kevin Smith-directed Jersey Girl. “I was like, 'I just don't know what to name this album. I just can't nail it, there's no title track,'” Lopez recalls. “[Affleck] was like, 'This is you right now. Everything that you're writing on this record that I've been seeing, this is you in this record, this moment. When you look back on the record, it'll be like, 'That was me then.'” This Is Me...Then represented artistic growth for Lopez, with emotional ballads that showed off her vocal and emotional range. “My experience with other artists is that when they're suffering, when they're in pain, they come out with this really crazy art. For me, it's the total opposite,” said Lopez. “When I'm in love is when I'm inspired the most. I was the most inspired then, and I have not made another record like that since then.” “Bennifer,” as Lopez and Affleck were known in the press, burned brightly, getting together in 2002—but their wedding in the fall of 2003 was postponed, and they broke up in early 2004. “Once we called off that wedding 20 years ago, it was the biggest heartbreak of my life,” Lopez says. “I honestly felt like I was going to die. It sent me on a spiral for the next 18 years where I just couldn't get it right. But now, 20 years later, it does have a happy ending. A 'that would never happen, we're not going to write that because nobody would believe it' ending.” Lopez is celebrating the 20th anniversary of This Is Me...Then with an expanded edition that features remixes by the likes of Paul Oakenfold and Ignorants. She's also celebrating her life coming full circle over the past two decades in a way that, she admits, “is a little bit like The Twilight Zone.” In 2023, Lopez will release This Is Me...Now, her first album in a decade. With songs like “Dear Ben Pt. II” and “Midnight Trip to Vegas,” it's directly referring to her rekindled relationship with Affleck, and showing how she's both evolved and stayed true to herself over the last two decades. “The whole message of the album Then is 'This love exists. This is a real love,'” said Lopez. “Now, the message is very much, 'If you were wondering if you have—like me at times—lost hope, and almost given up, don't. Because true love does exist and some things do last forever, and that's real.' I want to put that message out into the world, and that does take a lot of vulnerability. But I couldn't stop myself. Some parts of it scare me. And I think parts of it scare Ben, too. He's like, 'Oh, do you really want to say all this stuff?' And I'm like, 'I don't know how else to do it, baby.'”

  • J. Lo
    J. Lo
    J. Lo

    2001

  • On The 6
    On The 6
    On The 6

    Before she was J.Lo, she was Jennifer Lopez—rising Bronx-born actress, just Jenny from the block. And though she was best known at the time for having played Selena, she had never so much as stood in a recording studio until it was time to make her own debut album. “It was all so new and scary and exciting,” Lopez tells Apple Music. “That was the seed of who I was—just a girl who used to ride the 6 train and had big dreams and was a hopeless romantic—all of that is right there. I think the best pop album—the best album, period—is when someone just gives you their heart and their soul completely, and they tell you who they are in every way.” In 1999, there was a massive wave of Latin pop stars crossing over with English-language hits—Ricky Martin, Shakira, Enrique Iglesias—and Lopez's debut rode that wave, pushed along by Sony Music chief Tommy Mottola, who had a heavy hand in what would become On the 6. “I was born in the Bronx,” Lopez says, “but I barely spoke Spanish—I still struggle with it to this day. People were accepting Latin artists as just great artists. It was a groundbreaking moment.” She duets in Spanish on “No Me Ames” with future husband Marc Anthony, and the Rodney Jerkins-produced lead single—and her first No. 1 hit—“If You Had My Love” has traces of Latin guitar, but the album's most indelible cross-cultural moment wasn't a hit at all. “It was never a single, but for me, 'Let's Get Loud' is the record that jumped off the album,” Lopez says. “In sports arenas and all around the world now when I perform it, it still brings down the house.” Lopez would go on to star in bigger movies and record bigger hits. But for all the out-of-the-box success and trailblazing, On the 6's most impressive feat may be the way it allowed her to have the nearly frictionless dual-track career that many stars have attempted but few have truly achieved. “I just feel like that's what I always wanted to do and anyone who wasn't on board with that programme got left behind,” Lopez says. “It's just not letting anybody tell you that you can't do something when you know deep down that's part of who you are.”

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About Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez’s canny ability to bring the Nuyorican soundtrack of her upbringing to the global stage has defined her career. It was never more apparent than in 2020's Superbowl LIV halftime performance, where she celebrated Boricua pride in a thrilling, rhythm-heavy extravaganza. Blending uptown brass with brown-eyed soul and R&B, the multi-hyphenate artist brings her Latin freestyle edge to pop and hip-hop, always staying on the vanguard through savvy collaborations with French Montana, DJ Khaled, and Cardi B. Born in The Bronx in 1969, Jennifer Lynn Lopez started out in musical theatre as a child before she made waves as a Fly Girl dancer on In Living Color and then as an actress on the silver screen. Just after rising to fame with her acclaimed role as the late Tejano queen Selena, Lopez released her first single, 1999’s dance-pop banger “If You Had My Love.” Lopez welcomed funkier grooves and declared her hometown pride with 2002’s “Jenny from the Block.” She displayed her biculturalism and more romantic side on albums like 2007’s Como Ama una Mujer, but she proved she could still amp up the party when she teamed up with Pitbull for the EDM-heavy “On the Floor.” Over the decades, the performer has continued to embrace her lively Latin funk sensibility, as evidenced by 2019’s “Medicine” single. “You gravitate to what you know, to what feels comfortable and what feels good [...] That funk, those instruments, that’s what makes me move,” Lopez told Apple Music. “That percussion and brass live inside my blood. That’s what I grew up with, and that’s who I am at my core. It’s always going to be an influence.” For 2024's This Is Me...Now—the follow-up to her 2002 album that was inspired, in part, by her then-new romance with Ben Affleck—she went back to the original source material: a collection of love letters that he had held on to after they broke up and given to her after they reconciled nearly two decades later. That year she also performed an Apple Music Live session in Los Angeles.

HOMETOWN
Bronx, NY, United States
BORN
July 24, 1969
GENRE
Pop

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