Your tolerance for Jennifer Lopez’s first album in a decade will depend on how invested you are in the return of Bennifer, AKA her relationship with professional meme generator and actor Ben Affleck. The sequel to 2002’s This Is Me... Then, released when the pair were first engaged (they split in 2004), This Is Me... Now depicts their reunion, their marriage and their passionate lovemaking in eye-opening detail (there’s also an accompanying film).
The syrupy Mad in Love (“With you it’s paradise/ And it was worth the wait”) is perhaps the nadir, while the peppy Midnight Trip to Vegas, which interpolates Chris Isaak’s weepie Wicked Game, gets into the specifics of her and Affleck’s “crazy” and “simple” nuptials. On the horn-laced lead single Can’t Get Enough, which Lopez performed at said wedding, sex is conflated with an MOT (“you got my engine runnin’”, “you got me accelerated”, etc). There are nice moments of nostalgia: banger Hearts and Flowers references Jenny from the Block, while the excellent Rebound is a throwback R&B jam accentuated by fluttering harp. But songs such as To Be Yours and Not.going.anywhere offer very little outside of simply soundtracking a cosy night in chez Bennifer.
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