Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
We need President Biden’-time and Vice President Chucklehead to put out an APB (Album Pursuit Bulletin), because Jennifer Lopez’s “highly anticipated” new record is nowhere to be found.
Before I expand on that, a brief caveat: There is a chance that the album Jennifer Lopez announced one year ago today, This Is Me… Now—which is presumably finished, given that news of the album came with an entire tracklist of songs—will drop today. Perhaps we all woke up the morning of Nov. 25, 2023 to the early Christmas miracle of a surprise-released J.Lo album. But as I write this just a couple of days shy of Thanksgiving, there is still no sign of this album anywhere. And I have a hunch that if even Beyoncé is done dropping albums with no warning, an artist who hasn’t had a proper full-length project in almost a decade isn’t going to try that tactic now with her music career’s reputation at stake.
None of that is to say that I am not anticipating This Is Me… Now (if it does, indeed, exist), only that I am confused as to why Lopez would go as far as to announce an entire album a full year ago without a concrete release date. I’ve long theorized that Lopez is not so much a singer or an actress as she is a celebrity with a capital “C”: the type of person who is just really good at being famous. She’s forever hopping between several sectors of entertainment, and she’s talented enough in all of them to avoid being pigeonholed as any one type of artist.