Music Monday #27: J to Tha L-O!: The Remixes by Jennifer Lopez

I'm cheating.  To be fair this isn't the first time I have cheated making this list but I justify it for the fact that this album is all music by the same artist so technically even though it's a compilation and not a greatest hits album I say it still counts.

2002 saw Jennifer Lopez release 'J to Tha L-O: The Remixes' which brought together remixes of tracks from her first two albums 'On The 6' and 'J.Lo' both of which get an honourable mention because I love almost every track on both of them but I couldn't justify including both of them on this list as well as this one and this one I wanted to include the most. 

I love every single track on this album, from start to finish I can listen to the whole thing without skipping anything.  By now you will know that's rare, there are only a handful of artists I can say that for.  If I had to pick one track above all else that I love the most it would have to be Hex Hector's Momentous Mix of 'Waiting For Tonight' - this was the first time I heard Hex Hector's work and it would not be the last, indeed he'll get a mention again before the end of this list for a remix he did of another incredible artist but we'll get to that in time.

Waiting For Tonight in all its incarnations remains my favourite Jennifer Lopez track, the lyrics are perfection and every new incarnation is an experience of something new yet familiar that lets me find new ways to enjoy it all over again.  The lyrics are pretty direct their meaning isn't obscured, it's about longing for a love, waiting for it, and the moment when you finally get that chance to embrace it, this fits me like a glove there's really not much more I can say it doesn't need explanation and doesn't need to be justified if you've been reading these posts in series you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from me now.

Jennifer Lopez served another purpose for me though, she fed my desire to learn other languages, her music introduced me to the world of latin pop music, and the tracks she recorded in Spanish I devoured with gusto when I started learning to speak Spanish.  It won't come as a surprise then that I own the European Edition of the album which includes 'Una Noche Más' along with 'Si Ya Se Acabo', 'No Me Ames', and 'Que Ironia' all as bonus tracks, and that Una Noche Más was my favourite in particular.

I've followed J-Lo's career for 20 years, I own almost all her albums there's one or two I didn't care for but only positives here so we'll gloss over those.  I'd also like to take a moment to say I quite like her acting career as well, and that I think critics have often been quite harsh on her to the point where I think it's expected that critical reviews of her acting ventures will be biased toward the negative.  The best example of this that I can think of is 'The Cell' a movie released in 2000 that deals with many of the concepts that 'The Matrix' centred on which was released a year prior.  The Matrix remains one of my favourite movies of all time so perhaps I am biased here due to the fact that the subject matter overlaps in parts, but nevertheless the reaction critically to The Cell got quite negative and spiteful at times, I'd just like to point out the movie grossed over 3x its budget at the box office so I definitely would not consider that a box office bomb, but that is the slant some of the reviews choose to take with it, and this bias is repeated across many other movies J-Lo has been in.

You don't have to like everything someone does and that's definitely not the case here, there are albums of J-Lo I don't own, and as for her acting career that is quite extensive, in researching this post I discovered just how many productions she's appeared in, over 100 at this point, which I was completely unaware of, I only knew of a handful of the titles that featured prominently in pop culture over the years.  This isn't something unique to J-Lo for me though, I haven't explored Movies to the same extent that I have with Music, whenever I check anyone's IMDB profile it always amazes me just how long those list of appearances are, even when you filter them down to only include Movies and not TV shows etc.

Regardless, J-Lo is a staple in my music library and is one of the few artists as I said that can produce an album where I love every track.  I would hate to lose her contributions and I would definitely notice if they disappeared.  She also shares something with Madonna and Cher that I admire and that is her willingness to evolve, adapt, survive, and take risks.  They don't always pay off but then if they did they wouldn't be risks would they?  In the same vain she's also unapologetic, she is who she is, and she knows it, you can like it, or hate it, she's not going to change who she is because of your opinion which is something I've tried to live my life by - and at times failed miserably, but I still try, because it's more important for you to like yourself and who you are than to have people around you like you, the latter only leads to a life of misery and a place where you have to deny your nature and repress yourself for other peoples' amusement and that's incredibly toxic, I know from experience the damage that can do.  Be who you are, stay true to yourself, and fuck the people who try to tell you otherwise, life is too short to be miserable.