This Is Me…Now
ICYMI: Jennifer Lopez is madly in love.
The multihyphenate has proven time and time again that she is still hot for Ben Affleck two decades after their first go-around.
So do we really need a baker’s dozen of songs about Bennifer 2.0?
Well, apparently J.Lo thinks so, as her first album in a decade, “This Is Me…Now” (out Friday), is entirely about their rekindled relationship, from finding their way back to each other in 2021 to eloping in Las Vegas the following year.
“Now” is the sequel to “This Is Me…Then,” which Lopez released in 2002 at the height of the media circus surrounding Bennifer 1.0, but it pales in comparison to the hook-laden album that gave us “Jenny From the Block,” “I’m Glad,” “All I Have” and so many other classics.
To put it bluntly, it’s as watery as the iced coffee Affleck picks up from Dunkin’ every morning.
While pop powerhouses like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga reinvent themselves with each era of new music, Lopez is bogged down in her glory days, recycling uninspired sounds and stories from a quarter-century ago.
From the jump, the singer, 54, reminds us on the album’s title track that she “took some lefts” before landing right back in Affleck’s arms.
“Take me as I am / And I’ll take you as you are,” she warbles. “And we’ll build this life together / I found my shooting star.”
Lopez stresses yet again on the feel-good single “Can’t Get Enough” that she’s “still in love” with Affleck, 51, and tells haters on the hip-hop-leaning “This Time Around” that nothing can “break” the power couple now that they got “a do-over.”
“We gon’ do this s–t for the rest of our lives,” she intones on the latter.
At times, the Grammy nominee seems to be in a one-woman race to out-cringe herself lyrically. (She did release “Booty” after all.)
On the ’00s throwback “Not Going Anywhere,” she raps of her and the Oscar winner’s failed first attempt at love, “S–t was on the rocks like the ‘Harlem Shake.’”
And on the melodic “Greatest Love Story Never Told,” she moans about getting down and dirty with her husband, “Missing your body / Climbing on top of me / Slipping inside of me / Way that I ride it / Bodies aligning.” Yuck.
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There’s some beauty among the madness, though.
The slow burn “Broken Like Me” is J.Lo at her rawest; the pain in her voice is palpable as she reflects on picking up the pieces of her broken marriage to Marc Anthony before reuniting with Affleck.
“Two babies at home / Mama had to be strong,” she sings of her and Anthony’s now-15-year-old twins, Max and Emme. “In a battle for love / In a war of my own.”
Once Bennifer’s love story comes full circle, though, Lopez is a woman reborn.
The penultimate “Midnight Trip to Vegas” chronicles how the stress of wedding planning (“We’re drowning in orchid arrangements, dresses and pastries”) led the “Gigli” co-stars to “do something crazy” and rush to the world-famous Little White Wedding Chapel to say their “I dos.”
If only Lopez were that spontaneous with branching out of her comfort zone.
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