Is it just me or did Jennifer Lopez decide to make up for our collective NYE’s outfits by doing the absolute most with hers? Thank you, JLo, for dressing up for all of us.
Her JLo Beauty commercial, I mean, her New Year’s Eve performance, began with a video of her riding the 6 and S trains and walking through an empty Times Square in an outfit that was giving me major Carrie Bradshaw vibes.
Her actual performance outfit, a Balmain bodysuit at first covered by a long-ass coat she could only wear on top of stilts, or in this in case, some sort of platform, elicited some sort of Monty Python joke from my husband that I still don’t get. Her face cage (?) actually reminded me of her 2020 Superbowl performance with Shakira, which at this point, feels like it happened 5 years ago.
Full disclosure--I did not watch ABC’s Rockin’ Eve live. 2020 being the year that it was threw me a couple of little curve balls at the end, which included a pretty big cut on one of my fingers during a kitchen mishap, a kid who needed to be held as he cried about missing in-person school and our families who live far away, and a new TV setup that apparently could only show me the ABC News livestream, which I promise was even sadder than the Rockin’ Eve broadcast.
But back to JLo. Maybe because I watched it the next morning on Hulu, but it was tough to divorce the pandemic from the performance, and I imagine this was the case for NYE programming across other networks. The members of JLo’s backup band were all wearing masks (although the drummer was wearing a white bandana that gave me JLo and Diddy flashbacks!), and any shots beyond the stage were so different from any other NYE in the past, where the masks made the relatively few first responders in attendance mere Planet Fitness living advertisements.
Even when they showed Alex Rodriguez and the rest of their crew dancing to her hits, all I could think of was, “man, it must be nice to have the kind of money that affords you to be with so many of your loved ones at this time.” Please don’t watch the video on her Instagram when she came “home” after her performance because your brain will explode as you try to not count the number of people who are all together in an indoor space celebrating the launch of JLo Beauty, the real reason for this NYE performance.
I wish she had performed more of “Dance Again” and I could have done without a cover of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” But an attempt at Steven Tyler or an awkward stage slide is not what we will be talking about in 2021, because as Lainey says, nothing bad sticks to JLo!
