This year Jennifer Lopez celebrates her 25th anniversary as a global star. And it is being one of the most difficult. The commercial results of his latest album have been disappointing, he has canceled seven concerts of his American tour due to poor ticket sales and a ban has been opened for columns and social networks to question his image, his career and his personal history. The trigger has been the testimony of a singer who claims that Lopez barely sings in her best-known songs.
The first time Jennifer Lopez made headlines, her name appeared next to her price: one million dollars. It is what she earned for
Selena
in 1997 and what made her the first Latin actress to reach that salary. Journalists were shocked by the naturalness with which Lopez spoke about money, a taboo subject for Hollywood stars. “They thought she was going to get them cheap for
A Very Dangerous Romance
(1998), but I insisted to my agent: 'No, no, no. Ask for more,” she told
Movieline
. “People don't believe it, but they are paying me less than they should.” People, in fact, did not believe it: a stranger asking for a star salary. Thus arose a phrase that has haunted Lopez for years: “Who does she think she is?”
In 1999, when she was on the verge of becoming a movie star, Lopez debuted as a singer with
On The Six
. The title of the album referred to the subway line that she took to go to casting tests from the Bronx to Manhattan. She has made sure that her neighborhood origins, which turned her triumph into an epic story of overcoming, are always part of her narrative, from the movie
It Happened in Manhattan
(2002) to the song
Jenny From The Block
.
In 2003 Jennifer Lopez was already an industrial complex. She named herself a brand (Jlo) and released a perfume,
Glow
, when no top-level star did those things. She was the first person to have both a movie and an album at number 1. But when she started dating Ben Affleck, headlines were published like “Ben Affleck sleeps with the servants” (they were not accusing him of infidelity, but that they were calling the actress and singer a maid). The series
South Park
ridiculed the fact that she set herself up as the standard bearer of the Latino population without speaking Spanish, in an episode in which she called her “a cruel bitch.” And Conan O'Brian recreated a quote between Affleck and Lopez: “to make him our intern, to make her our cleaning lady.”
The couple's exhibitionism, their outings to dinner in rhinestone-encrusted tracksuits, celebrating their engagement with buckets of fried chicken, and the rumor that Affleck had bought his fiancée a toilet with sapphires, rubies, pearls, and a diamond ( designed by himself and valued at 150,000 euros) generated all kinds of classist criticism that stated that no matter how much money she had, Lopez would never stop being ordinary. A woman without class and obsessed with the ostentation of her new wealth. When a rumor spread that she had insured her butt for a million dollars (which she has denied on several occasions), people believed it not because it was true, but because it corresponded to the image they had formed of her in his head.
In 2003, a Guardian editorial
titled
Why
We Love to Hate Jlo
called her “the most reviled woman in modern popular culture.” “She is a symbol of exacerbated consumerism, of breaking barriers regarding public sexuality and of artists who behave like marketing brands,” said Lawrence Donegan.
In the 2000s, there were three things every human being knew about Jennifer Lopez: her million-dollar butt, her delirious prenuptial agreement with Affleck (which required four sexual intercourses a week), and her diva-like whims. It was said that she demanded that no one address her or look at her, that her coffee be turned counterclockwise, that she did not interact directly with the workers but communicated through an assistant, that she She was stingy with tips, refused to work with people whose zodiac sign was Virgo, or demanded that her dressing rooms be entirely white. These last two are the only confirmed rumors: the first was confirmed by Heather Morris (
Glee
) and the second was told by Alberto Caballero, who in 1999 worked on
Party Night.
The public considered Jennifer Lopez, in addition to being a superstar, a parody of superstars.
But in the middle of the last decade, the fourth wave feminist embraced Jennifer Lopez. In 2020, her role as a stripper in
Hustlers on Wall Street
earned her the best reviews of her career, and her performance alongside Shakira at the Super Bowl put her on top of the world. In 2021 she sang
America The Beautiful
at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration and, during the final notes of the song, she indulged in singing
Let's Get Loud
. It was a tribute to the Latino population of the United States, so vilified by Donald Trump, and also a tribute to herself: no one could expect, when she was shaking her hips to that salsa dance hit in the summer of 2000, that the girl from the Bronx I would go so far. How did she end up trapped in this image crisis then?
It all started during the pandemic. Lopez shared videos of her confinement in which her children were playing in a garden the size of a football stadium. To commemorate the anniversary of her hit
De ella Love Do n't Cost A Thing
(from 2000)
He encouraged his followers to record themselves throwing luxury objects on the beach to the rhythm of the song when the majority of people, still confined, had neither luxury objects nor a beach on which to record themselves throwing them. For a woman determined to make authenticity part of her brand (she has two songs called
I'm Real
), Lopez seemed extravagantly out of touch with reality.
This year, her mammoth audiovisual project
This Is Me... Now
(an album, a musical film and a documentary) received snide criticism that accused her of being narcissistic, egomaniacal and not self-aware. She financed the film herself and in the documentary she is seen thanking her team “because I asked you for the moon when we had a budget for a pack of chewing gum.” The film cost 20 million euros. Even Jane Fonda appears in the documentary to tell her that it may not be a good idea to overexpose her relationship with Ben Affleck, whom she ended up marrying in 2021.
The album spent a single week among the 200 most successful albums in the United States (it came in at number 38 and then disappeared) and he had to redesign his tour: given the poor initial ticket sales, he decided to reconvert it into a greatest hits tour, always more attractive to the masses. The paradox is that Lopez has 253 million followers on Instagram, which does not translate into people willing to pay to see her live. And here the key word is, precisely,
direct
.
The first to suggest that Lopez didn't really sing in her songs was another star: Mariah Carey. The two women were rivals in the early 2000s because of Tommy Mottola, Carey's ex-husband and boss, who sabotaged her career by stealing ideas from her and giving them to Lopez. That feud generated one of the internet's favorite memes (
I don't know her
) and a string of taunts over the years: when Carey said she slept three hours a day, interviewer Vanessa Grigoriadis pointed out that Lopez slept eight to rest. the skin well. “If I didn't have to sing on my own songs, I'd sleep eight hours a day too,” Carey replied. No one understood what she meant.
“When she told Jlo claims to get 8, Mariah said if I had the luxury of not having to actually sing my own songs, I'd do that too.” https://t.co/0E3CtpkUpm https://t.co/E2gcNfghOh
— Azula's Therapist (@ohgodjohnwhy) August 15, 2022
Today many people understand that mockery. Perhaps because the confidentiality contracts are beginning to expire (20 years have passed), the singer Natasha Ramos was encouraged to clarify on TikTok a rumor that had been circulating the margins of the internet for a long time without managing to enter the mainstream conversation: that Jennifer Lopez does not sings in most of its choruses.
Ramos was hired to sing the
Jenny From The Block
demo . The production team liked her voice so much, very similar to Lopez's, that she asked him to record five more songs for the album
This Is Me... Then
(including the single
I'm Glad
). Ramos received 3,500 dollars (at the exchange rate, just over 5,000 euros in 2024) and a backup singer's credit. However, as she claims and as the original demo demonstrates, it is her voice that sounds in the final song. And not only in the choruses, but in the laughter and the war cry “From the Bronx!” Lopez's voice only sounds in the verses.
This time the news did have an impact. Several media outlets unearthed this open secret: in
I'm Real
and
Ain't It Funny
it is Ashanti who sings the chorus, in
Play
it is Christina Milian and in the most recent
Ain't Your Mama,
Meghan Trainor. Several analysts have pointed out that in other of Lopez's greatest hits such as
If You Had My Love
,
Love Don't Cost a Thing
and
All I Have,
Lopez's voice does not sound in the choruses either and they have speculated that they were actually recorded by backup singers such as Shawnyette Harrell, Makeva Riddick, Canela Cox or Shalene Thomas. The theory presupposes that they resorted to those voices, with more range than Lopez's, to disguise the vocal deficiencies of the star, capable of defending the notes of a verse, but not those of a chorus.
In January, a clip went viral in which fashionable actress Ayo Edelbiri (
The Bear
) questioned Lopez's talent during her appearance on a podcast in 2020. “Jennifer Lopez's career is a long-term scam,” Edelbiri said. “The issue is that she believes she is the one who sings in the songs. But it's not her. And when she tells it, people say: 'Jlo didn't have time to go to the studio.' Like she was busy. Doing what? Because singing, of course not.”
In March, a video went viral of Lopez spitting gum into her assistant's hand during the filming of
Jefa by Accident
in New York. The movie is from six years ago. That it is going viral now means that public opinion has definitively turned against Lopez and that it is open hunting season against her. She's always been an easy target. “Performing authenticity is a double-edged sword for celebrities,” Álex Zaragoza wrote in a column published in
the Los Angeles Times
. “The public will turn against you as soon as they find you too irritating, too leading, too adorable, too anything, especially if you are a woman.”
In his analysis
For
The Ringer
, Justin Charity points out that Lopez “has always been an unsympathetic figure, a climber whose setbacks aroused satisfaction, a pop villain. And that cynicism comes from the disproportion between her fame and her talent. “Jlo is a talented star, but talent for what, exactly?”
In April, social networks started to question its very repeated origin story. At one point in the documentary
The Greatest Story Never Told
, the singer ruffles her hair while she remembers that when she was 16 years old she “wore her hair like that, she ran around in the Bronx, up the neighborhood, down the neighborhood; She was a crazy and wild girl; without limits and full of dreams.” The 13-second clip prompted comments on social media such as: “That story of 'I'm humble, I'm from the neighborhood' no longer works for you. Stop it” or “At this point the neighborhood deserves copyrights” or “Ben has to listen to the history of the Bronx every day.”
But the most commented opinion was that of a neighbor of Lopez: “We went to the same private girls' school in a neighborhood of Irish and Italians, so you weren't running around up and down the neighborhood.” Some even dusted off school photos of Lopez, in which she appeared with short, perfectly combed hair, and reminded her that her father was a computer scientist and her mother was her teacher. In the era of immediate
fact-checking
, it is more difficult to invent oneself.