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CD Reviews
Review by the Rolling Stones ( On The 6 )
Jennifer Lopez has already moved beyond the confines of the everyday
Hollywood sex symbol: She has become a symbol of sex itself, muscling her way
into Forties-style silver-screen glamour and doing more for womanly hips than
any movie star since Rita Hayworth got her Gilda on. So it makes sense for La
Lopez to try her luck at music, too, as the old-fashioned kind of all-purpose
entertainer for whom telethons and Bob Hope specials were invented. The happy
surprise of On the 6 is that she knows what she's doing. Instead of strained
vocal pyrotechnics, Lopez sticks to the understated R&B murmur of a
round-the-way superstar who doesn't need to belt because she knows you're
already paying attention. When she gets the right support from a top-shelf song
daddy like Rodney Jerkins, she's all brassy, breathy confidence, evoking her
great precursor Ann-Margret's 1964 classic with Al Hirt, Beauty and the Beard.
Behold jiggy Jennifer Lopez, song-and-dance woman: She makes a little va-va and
a whole lot of voom go a long way.
(RS 816-817)
Rob Sheffield
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Review by the Wall of Sound ( J.LO )
It's not so surprising that Jennifer Lopez has released a second disc that
sounds an awful lot like her first. After all, pop stars are notorious for
repeating themselves — especially when they had smashing success with a
formula or even a particular sound the first time through.
But the booty-ful señorita isn't just repeating herself once via J.Lo, which
might as well be named On the 6-1/2 for all its similarities to her debut disc.
Instead, she's giving us déjà vu all over and over and over again by basically
sticking to the same set of sonic templates throughout the 15-track album, never
making much effort to shift up the tempos, melodies, and structures. (It doesn't
help, either, that she's got one of the most limited vocal ranges this side of
Britney Spears, making her heavily processed vocals sound largely the same from
track to track.)
And strangely enough, Lopez — who first caught the world's eye dancing with
the Fly Girls — doesn't do much for the dance floor along the tediously
repetitive way, sticking mostly with plodding mid-tempo fare that lacks the sort
of spark that makes her obvious idol Madonna's music so successful in clubland.
"Love Don't Cost a Thing," the lead single which makes an interesting
attempt at weaving a complicated vocal tapestry through so many overdubs, limps
along like a Destiny's Child 45 played at 33 rpm. "We Gotta Talk" rips
off the same group — and suffers the same slow-mo fate, even in spite of a few
of those trademark She'kspere double-time beats.
"Ain't It Funny," which steals its melody wholesale from Madonna's
"La Isla Bonita," has a better rhythmic base, but it still sort of
runs in place, as though Lopez recorded it while standing on a treadmill.
"Dance With Me" hardly inspires fast-flying feet, either, with a
layered loop that comes up a few BPMs — and a whole lot of dynamics — short
of generating any real rhythmic heat. Even the album's pure Latin numbers, like
"Cariño," seem a bit too slow, lacking any real punch.
Only the funked-up, synth-based "Walking on Sunshine" (an apparent
hybrid of Madonna's "Music" and Prince's "Sexy MF") and the
thumping, cascading "That's Not Me" (the only Destiny's Child rip here
that works) make you want to instinctively kick out the jams.
It's just too bad that Lopez doesn't change up those jams — and their tempos
— as much as she switches hairstyles. Otherwise, we might be talking about
more than a so-so J.Lo.
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Review by the Rolling Stones ( J.LO )
Forget Jennifer Lopez the actress, star, head-turning clotheshorse and
callipygian paradigm. Sure, in her new single, "Love Don't Cost a
Thing," she explains that she's not impressed with your Benz because she's
got her own. Yes, the title of her new album, J.Lo, appears as diamond-studded
jewelry on the cover. But in a music career that is now on its second record,
Lopez's celebrity doesn't travel much further than the come-hither looks in the
CD booklets.
Instead, J.Lo casts her as a Nuyorican Everyhottie, constantly torn between
ravishing you and bouncing your sorry self out the door. She's ready to dance
all night, "do very erotic things" in English and Spanish, and promise
lifelong happiness until, inevitably, you start playing games or try to push her
around. Juggling desire and distrust, club-hopping and career, independence and
commitment, Latin heritage and assimilation is Everyhottie's predicament. For
her, love seesaws between pleasures and power struggles.
In "I'm Real," one of seven songs on J.Lo for which Lopez shares
writing credit, she offers voluptuous good times as long as you "don't ask
me where I've been." While she brags that she's made you fall in love, an
admiring male voice chants, "She's a bad, bad bitch." Getting through
the post-feminist hip-hop contradictions here is more of a brain twister than
finding the bad guy in The Cell.
So it's fitting that most of the music sounds like jigsaw puzzles: showers of
tiny bits and pieces that interlock as complex, coherent songs. Modeled around
her merely adequate, studio-assisted voice, J.Lo shamelessly follows the lead of
TLC, Destiny's Child, Janet Jackson and Madonna, as Lopez singsongs through one
clever staccato construction after another.
Rodney ("Say My Name") Jerkins produced only two songs on J.Lo, and
they're not his best. But his influence (along with Kevin "She'kspere"
Briggs and their shared source, Timbaland) is all over the album, as acoustic
guitars and computer-generated harpsichord tones pick out airy, minimalist
lattices. Warning songs such as "That's Not Me" move in nervous,
skittering syncopations, layering half-speed vocal lines over double-speed runs,
creating a balance that might fly apart with one missed pager beep.
For ballads, Lopez tries to coo and whisper like Janet Jackson, inviting a
"sweet kiss on my thigh" in "Come Over," though you have to
wonder about her taste in men in "Secretly," which praises a guy whom
she can smell across the room. When the songs move toward the dance floor - two
of them explicitly call out to DJs - stringy sounds are replaced by brittle
techno blips, as in the speedy pop-trance workout "Walking on
Sunshine" (not the Katrina and the Waves song but a new one whose writers
include Lopez and her boyfriend, Sean "Puffy" Combs).
Lopez hasn't forgotten her unusual position as a Latina who has triumphed in the
American mainstream. But her latest nods to Latin pop sound contrived. She piles
on Hispanic signifiers - bullfight trumpet in "Ain't It Funny,"
flamenco guitar in "Si Ya Se Acabo" - only to sound like she's
repeatedly remaking Madonna's "Isla Bonita." Though Lopez doesn't
repeat the mistake of placing her thin voice alongside a vastly superior singer
(as she did in duets with Marc Anthony on her 1999 debut, On the 6), she can't
stand up to the horn sections in "Carino" or "Dame," either.
Most of the songs on J.Lo, for all their craftsmanship, are easy to trace to
last year's hits. And while dance pop doesn't necessarily demand great singers,
Lopez is just scraping by. Her presence fades with every note she sings, until
she sounds too convincingly ordinary. Maybe she'd be better off playing the
urban Everyhottie as a speaking role. (RS 863)
Jon Pareles
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