We need President Biden’-time and Vice President Chucklehead to put out an APB (Album Pursuit Bulletin), because Jennifer Lopez’s “highly anticipated” new record is nowhere to be found.
Before I expand on that, a brief caveat: There is a chance that the album Jennifer Lopez announced one year ago today, This Is Me… Now—which is presumably finished, given that news of the album came with an entire tracklist of songs—will drop today. Perhaps we all woke up the morning of Nov. 25, 2023, to the early Christmas miracle of a surprise-released J.Lo album. But as I write this just a couple of days shy of Thanksgiving, there is no sign of this album anywhere. And I have a hunch that if even Beyoncé is done dropping albums with no warning, an artist who hasn’t had a proper full-length project in almost a decade isn’t going to try that tactic now with her music career’s reputation at stake.
None of that is to say that I am not anticipating This Is Me... Now (if it does, indeed, exist), only that I am confused as to why Lopez would go as far as to announce an entire album a full year ago without a concrete release date. I’ve long theorized that Lopez is not so much a singer or an actress as she is a celebrity with a capital “C”: the type of person who is just really good at being famous. She’s forever hopping between several sectors of entertainment, and she’s talented enough in all of them to avoid being pigeonholed as any one type of artist.
But that creative elasticity creates an unavoidable messiness with each new project, resulting in a series of delays that have, in turn, hampered her reliability. The delay of Lopez’s ninth studio album is just another in the string of broken promises that comprise her tumultuous, late-period singing career, contributing to a head-scratching portrait of a star. One has to wonder: By the time This Is Me… Now is eventually released, won’t it just be Jennifer Lopez… then?
This Is Me… Then is the title of Lopez’s third album, the record to which This Is Me… Now is supposed to be a sequel. The follow-up album’s 2022 announcement, in an interview with Apple Music, coincided with the twentieth anniversary of This Is Me… Then, a perfect occasion to get fans to toss the old album a few extra streams. Having an entire hour-long, intimate conversation with Zane Lowe about an album that, for all intents and purposes, may not exist, is perhaps the funniest possible thing that Lopez could’ve done in this situation. But This Is Me… Now is not so much a “musical experience”—as the announcement video proclaimed—as it is an exercise in myth-making for a celebrity who has managed to maintain her relevance for the last 25 years.
According to Lopez, the new record is partly a tribute to Lopez’s husband Ben Affleck, with whom she reunited in 2021, almost two decades after the term “Bennifer” entered the cultural lexicon. Though their first go-around crashed and burned, Bennifer made moms around the world believe in love again when they got back together. This Is Me… Now’s tracklist—which includes titles like “Dear Ben Pt. II” and “Midnight Trip to Vegas” (a reference to Lopez and Affleck’s Las Vegas wedding)—appears to be as much about validating their romance in the public eye as it is about actually wanting to release the damn music.
I guess this is where I come out as a clairvoyant, because I predicted we would be here today. On Nov. 29, 2022, just four days after Lopez blacked out her Instagram feed and announced This Is Me… Now, I tweeted, “No one can convince me this album is going to see the light of day.” What can I say? I know a stunt when I see one.
Over the last year, I’ve been tracking the progress of this album rollout to see if Lopez and her team would successfully pull it off. It has admittedly been one of my favorite things to keep tabs on, if only because I revel in the times when my knowledge of industry patterns turns out to be right. (Nelnet, unfortunately, does not accept pop culture prescience as a form of payment toward the loans I incurred to fine-tune this ability.)
I wanted to know if This Is Me… Now could escape the same fate that Lopez’s last two albums, 2011’s Love? and 2014’s A.K.A., which were both pushed back for months after their respective initial announcements. In the years since then, Lopez’s output has consisted of one-off singles and collaborations. It even got to the point where I was sure that she had finally become content with being a singles artist—a musician who is so successful that they no longer need to pretend to care about making an entire album.
Not so, apparently! While I’d be more than content with Lopez continuing to release a string of random songs as excellent as the midtempo earworm “In The Morning” and thumping “Cambia el Paso,” she won’t settle—even if the delay ultimately reflects poorly on the momentum behind her career.
Shortly after telling the world about This Is Me… Now, Lopez began to use the title as a hashtag on her Instagram posts. The hashtag was fitting for a behind-the-scenes look from the album cover shoot, or dispatches from the studio, or dance rehearsal (what she had to rehearse with no music videos in sight, we’ll never know). But it only took a few months after November 2022 for Lopez to start throwing the #THISISMENOW hashtag onto sponsored posts for energy drinks and footwear collaborations. “I love shoes!!!!! Can anyone relate??!!” she pondered in one caption. If I bite and buy a fucking $60 pump, will you release a single?
This summer, it looked as though we might be in the final stretch. “Album delivery day,” Lopez captioned a post in June, suggesting that the record had finally been mixed and was ready for the label (again, despite already being announced seven months earlier with a cover and tracklist all set!). In September, news broke that Lopez had signed a new publishing deal with BMG and would be holding a special concert at Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theater to promote the album. The concert was scheduled to stream live on Apple TV+, but the stream was ultimately postponed. The JLovers in attendance had their phones locked away upon entry into the theater, so all we have to prove that these songs exist is their word. Regrettably, I don’t know how much I trust the members of the Beyond Beautiful J.Lo Forum to supply an unbiased opinion, much less refuse a bribe from the folks at BMG to say that this album is real. (Kidding!)
Two more months have passed, and here we find ourselves on the anniversary of the This Is Me… Now announcement, sans album. And it’s because we’re here, more or less empty-handed beyond a silly album promo video and a few hashtags, that I feel confident enough to make the following decree: Jennifer Lopez should give up music for good. Or at least give up her other projects until this album finally sees the light of day.
Please don’t get me wrong: It’s not that I don’t enjoy Lopez’s music, I am one of three people who know and enjoy the divalicious RuPaul reject song that is “Tens.” I just think she would be better served to stop playing the part of an artist who is at all committed to this bit. We’re already in an industry landscape where the traditional album rollout is all but dead. Lopez’s last full-length LP arrived in the wake of Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled album quite literally changing the game with that digital drop—as Bey so memorably once said. It’s difficult to watch Lopez and her team struggle to achieve a prosperous and exciting album launch, especially after the last two album cycles were just as scattered, long before the once conventional months-long release strategy was altered.
For all her talk about This Is Me… Now being a passion project about love, it doesn’t seem like Lopez loves making music. I certainly don’t see the same fire from her in this space as I do when I watch her sensational performances in Hustlers, The Mother, and Shotgun Wedding. Hell, in Marry Me, her fictional pop star looked a lot more apathetic performing her songs than she did acting out a fake marriage to Owen Wilson.
And if she isn’t going to retire from music beyond the occasional single here and there, she should at least narrow her business commitments to focus on pushing one thing at a time so this wacky rollout never happens again. As much as I loved her low-alcohol Delola spritzes, it’s time to put down the Bella Berry booze and pick up a damn microphone! I don’t want to see a single J.Lo Beauty makeup tutorial until the collection’s “Hit Single” Foundation stops being a depressingly ironic name for a product. The title of This Is Me… Now suggests an immediacy that Lopez’s musical career has not had in well over a decade, and if she can’t put it all toward being a hitmaker, it’s time for Jennifer Lopez, the singer, to hit the bricks.
