Last week wasn’t the best week for Jennifer Lopez. Several tour stop were quietly cancelled and while the official reason is logistical issues, there are some reports of slow sales. And her new album, This Is Me … Now, isn’t doing all that great either. 

 

Variety also included her in a story published on Friday about “Aging Popstars and the Struggle to Keep Making Pop Music”- the piece opens on Justin Timberlake, whose own album isn’t exactly lighting up the charts either. Everything I Thought It Was is described as “trying to squeeze into an outfit you rocked in your early 30s that might still look good but is way too tight in the crotch: The music on “Everything I Thought It Was” is a solid if predictable revival of his classic sound, but the at-times cringingly sexual lyrics are like being forced to watch the happily married couple Timberlake lovingly sings about in other songs drunkenly dirty dancing.” LOL forever. 

 

The article isn’t as harsh with JLo’s new music but it does point out that the music isn’t performing. And as much as JLo fans are taking exception to what they perceive to be an insult to their girl, let’s not pretend that any of the songs off This Is Me… Now are making a cultural impact or even in moderate rotation. 

The two films that accompanied the release of the album, however, did and are doing well on Amazon Prime so I wonder – would we rather watch her than listen to her? I can’t resist JLo when I can see her, I will ever stop wanting to watch her. But if I can’t see her, I can’t say that I ever choose to hear her. 

 

JLo, no doubt, is aware of all this chatter. She knows how the album is being received and for sure she and her team know about this Variety article. But if you watched the latest documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told, you also know that it wouldn’t be the first time in her long career that she’s had to hear about how she came up short. This is why, despite the fact that she is Jennifer Lopez, she always feels like she has to keep fighting. And when JLo is in fight mode, she doesn’t shrink, she doesn’t hide. 

Here she is, with Ben Affleck, courtside at the Lakers game yesterday. She wore her hair straight over a white cropped tee and an amazing pair of jeans that I need to ID. Check her out cheering on the Laker girls. 

 

And here’s a shot of her and Ben waiting for his son Samuel and his friend before heading into the arena. 

 

So she’s out there, facing forward, taking it straight on, like she always has, even though people are calling her a flop. Because that’s the benefit of the non-stop hustle – when you’re always working, there’s always something else in the pipeline. Her new movie, Atlas, comes out on Netflix on May 24. Last year in the same month, her movie The Mother became one of Netflix’s most watched movies ever. What’s interesting about that is that the reviews for The Mother were pretty sh-tty, and those were the headlines that most people saw at the time. Still, a lot of people were watching – obviously since the movie did big numbers on Netflix – but that headline didn’t make its way around with the same noise as the negative headlines about the critical response to it. Let’s see what happens when Atlas comes out and see if it follows the same pattern.