Jennifer Lopez: A decades-long career without the need for constant reinvention
In an industry of re-invention, Jennifer Lopez continues to make good on her 18-year-old promise to remain ‘Jenny from the block’.
There’s no denying that the last few years have been triumphant for Lopez. In 2018, she collected a Video Vanguard Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Video Music Awards. Rather than punctuating a career coming to a close, her lifetime achievement award arrived a few years premature of some of her buzziest career highlights.
Only one year later, Lopez’s performance in Hustlers, vaulted her into the film industry’s awards circuit more than 20 years after she earned critical acclaim for Selena (1997) and Out of Sight (1998). At the top of 2020, Lopez took to the stage at the Super Bowl Halftime Show alongside Shakira, boosting her music catalog sales by 800 percent following her performance.
Entertainers — chiefly female musicians –– have long established their careers in distinct eras organized around album releases. Whether they’re tracing parallels in their personal lives, marking experimentations in new genres or simply chronicling their age in the cases of Adele and Taylor Swift, these phases are formative for the artists and fans alike.
Take, for example, Britney’s evolution from the princess of pop with …Baby One More Time to the comeback queen with Femme Fatale. A rebellious newcomer with Madonna’s Like a Virgin to her latest studio album, Madame X, conceptualized around the person she’s become living in Lisbon, Portugal. Or even Beyoncé’s creation of an alter ego that became the namesake for her 2008 album I am… Sasha Fierce. Each phase markets an evolved or never-before-seen layer of the artist, drawing us closer to virtually every songstress from Diana Ross to Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga to Katy Perry.
And yet, Jennifer Lopez has stayed the path of the Bronx-born triple threat for nearly three decades. A self-described romantic, Lopez’s love life comes closer to cataloguing the chapters of her career than her discography does.
However, Jennifer Lopez’s niche and her intrigue in the entertainment industry lies in her newness (now timelessness) and her unfailing ability to activate any one of her talents at precisely the right time.
During an interview on The Ellen Degeneres Show in November 2018, Degeneres prefaces a question about Lopez’s age (49 at the time) by saying, “I mean look at that body – I mean first of all you were a dancer.”
To which Jennifer promptly interjects, “I – I am a dancer.” Rightfully clarifying that the very thing that put her on the map on In Living Color in 1990 is still one of her most lauded gifts.
She is immovable in her own talents perhaps because what she is isn’t offered elsewhere in Hollywood.
Lopez’s choices as a performer and several of her film roles often champion her identity as a Latin American woman. Trailblazing for Latin acts to come, Lopez became the highest-paid Latina in Hollywood after earning $1 million for the titular role in Selena. She also helped to usher in Latin pop with songs, like ‘Waiting for Tonight’ and ‘Que Hicisite’, years before the zeitgeist welcomed Despacito-esque songs to the top of the music charts.
Whereas the eras of her peers are debuted and eventually retired, like brief chapters, Lopez’s story is continuously in-the-making. Without the trappings of album covers as masks or personas, Lopez has managed to be a mainstay of stage, screen and songs like ear worms with a personality and presence that fills a void.
A 2019 study conducted by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California found that only three percent of the 100 top-grossing films each year from 2007 to 2018 featured Latino actors in lead or co-lead roles. Lopez standing out among them.
Lopez’s story — wrought with hoop earrings and double-entendres regarding her derrière — is uncharted, though it won’t be the last of its kind.
On occasion, she’s J.Lo. Even then, the nickname transcends any one song, album or project, making it so she maintains her career not as a persona, but as herself — as Jennifer Lopez.
Originally published on Medium.