This past summer, Jennifer Lopez married Ben Affleck. It was his second marriage and her fourth. Marc Cohn sang at the wedding. The whole spectacle was terribly romantic. These two people, together nearly 20 years ago, had lived twisty and chaotic public lives before finding their way back to each other. I’m happy for them. Most people are happy for them. But when the whole Bennifer situation was first popping off, the widespread reaction was something like: Please get these two idiots off of our televisions.
People did not like Bennifer. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck first got together in 2002, shortly after Lopez divorced her second husband, the former backup dancer Cris Judd. Within a few months, they were engaged, and Lopez dedicated her album This Is Me… Then to Affleck. This was in a moment when the American tabloid press was operating at full steam, and magazines like Us Weekly made Lopez and Affleck into two of the protagonists of the whole tapestry of American fame. Even before they got together, both Lopez and Affleck were among the most famous people on the planet. When they became a couple, the PR shitstorm wore everyone out. The backlash was sharp and immediate, and it coincided with a moment when Lopez and Affleck, both together and apart, were making a lot of wack shit. The backlash overwhelmed both of them, and it left a deep dent in both of their careers.
Early in 2003, though, Jennifer Lopez still had juice. She’d been in a couple of romantic comedies, 2001’s The Wedding Planner and 2002’s Maid In Manhattan, that had made serious money. The dramas Angel Eyes and Enough hadn’t done so well, but people were still interested in J.Lo being flirty. That also held true with her music career. Lopez had teamed up with Ja Rule on two remixes, 2001’s “I’m Real” and 2002’s “Ain’t It Funny,” that topped the Hot 100 for a combined 11 weeks. Lopez’s dance-pop singles hadn’t done so well, but when Jennifer Lopez teamed up with a New York rapper, she could still dominate the radio. In 2003, she pulled that act off one last time.
The album This Is Me… Then, which came out around the same time that Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck first got engaged, was supposed to be an R&B album — something a little more serious and grown-up than the breezy summertime radio smashes that she’d made with Ja Rule. Lopez had a problem, though: She was not an R&B singer. She’d gotten away with impersonating one well enough on her 1999 debut album On The 6, mostly thanks to the tricky, busy beats of the era. By 2003, R&B production had become something much more warm and spare, and even with Auto-Tune all over her voice, Lopez couldn’t hang. That, combined with the growing Bennifer backlash, kept This Is Me… Then from selling as much as Lopez’s previous albums. But Lopez did squeak out one last #1 hit — not by teaming up with Ja Rule, but by getting together with another Queens rapper who’d been around for a whole lot longer.
In 2003, the 35-year-old LL Cool J had been a rap star for more than half his life. James Todd Smith was born in the Long Island town of Bay Shore. (On the day of LL’s birth, the #1 song in America was the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye.”) When James was four, his father, a truck driver, shot James’ mother and his grandfather during an argument. James found both of them after the shooting, and they were both covered in blood, but they survived. James went to live with his grandparents in the Queens neighborhood of St. Albans. There, he got to live a fairly comfortable middle-class life.
LL Cool J, as he called himself, was part of the first generation of kids that grew up with rap music. He’s said that he started rapping at age nine, which was in 1977 — around the time when live bootlegs of South Bronx rap routines started making their way out to boroughs like Queens. Maybe LL is exaggerating a little there, but maybe not. LL’s mother and grandfather bought him turntables and a drum machine, and when he was 14, he started using them to make demo tapes. He’d send those tapes to any record-label addresses that he could find in liner notes. One of those addresses wasn’t an office; it was Rick Rubin’s dorm room at NYU. Rubin had put that address on the first record from his newly launched indie label Def Jam Records: T La Rock and Jazzy Jay’s now-classic 1984 single “It’s Yours,” which was also the first rap record that Rubin ever produced.
Rick Rubin heard young LL Cool J’s demo tape one day after his friend, the Beastie boy Ad-Rock, dug it out of a pile of submissions. Rubin and Ad-Rock thought the tape was funny at first, but they kept listening to it. Soon enough, Rubin got together with LL and recorded “I Need A Beat.” The single came out in 1984, when LL was 16. LL’s commanding bluster worked beautifully with Rubin’s crunching, minimal production. When Rubin and Russell Simmons launched Def Jam as a proper record label, “I Need A Beat” was the first Def Jam record with a catalog number. It sold well, and that helped Def Jam get a production deal with Columbia. A year later, when the movie Krush Groove attempted to mythologize the beginning of Def Jam, LL made his screen debut in an electrifying cameo as the kid who wordlessly demands an audition.
The song that LL raps in that scene is “I Can’t Live Without My Radio,” the lead single from LL’s Rubin-produced 1985 debut album Radio. That album is a stone cold classic of that mid-’80s rap moment, when the music was still a stripped-down attack. LL toured with his contemporaries Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, and he established a rep as the toughest kid out. The album went platinum. Two years later, LL hit even bigger with Bigger And Deffer, an album that he recorded with a cadre of Los Angeles producers. LL’s classic single “I’m Bad” became his first Hot 100 hit, peaking at #84. But LL made a much bigger impact with the simpering, soft-spoken “I Need Love,” which took advantage of LL’s heartthrob image and basically invented the love-rap ballad. “I Need Love” was a #1 R&B hit, and it peaked at #14 on the Hot 100. LL would go back to that well many, many times.From the late ’80s to the early ’00s, LL Cool J displayed a remarkably adaptable staying power. He was never the most advanced or critically acclaimed rapper, but he just kept making hits, leaving behind a head-spinning number of gold and platinum albums. LL would swing wildly between the R&B-flavored love-raps that infuriated purists and the chest-beating tough-guy anthems that let everyone know that he was still hard. LL had entertaining feuds with rappers that were older than him, like Kool Moe Dee, and with rappers that were younger than him, like Canibus. You would want to discount him for the cheesy pop songs, but then he’d come back with the bangers that would make that impossible. Sometimes, LL did both at once, as when the 1990 single “Around The Way Girl” peaked at #9, becoming his first top-10 pop hit. (It’s a 7.)
In the ’90s, LL Cool J made some monster singles like “Mama Said Knock You Out” and the posse cuts “I Shot Ya” and “4, 3, 2, 1.” But LL’s biggest hits were the frothy crossover tracks that he recorded with R&B singers. Two of those songs became LL’s highest-charting singles: the 1995 Boyz II Men collab “Hey Lover” and the 1996 Total collab “Loungin’,” both of which peaked at #3. (“Hey Lover” is a 4, and “Loungin'” is a 6.) LL also launched a genuine acting career that started, I guess, with that Krush Groove cameo. In the late ’90s, LL was the lead on In The House, a sitcom that jumped from network to network but still managed to last four seasons. He also showed up in a lot of B-movies, including a few that I really like, like Deep Blue Sea and Halloween H20. That Deep Blue Sea role also allowed LL to make one of the silliest music videos in history.
When LL Cool J got the call to work with Jennifer Lopez, the man was still very commercially relevant. When I saw that LL’s 2000 album was called G.O.A.T. and that the title stood for “Greatest Of All Time,” I thought the title was dumb and embarrassing. Shows what I know. A couple of decades later, the term “GOAT” is just part of the lexicon. That album went gold, and the Neptunes-produced single “Luv U Better” made it to #4. (It’s a 5.)
Jennifer Lopez didn’t include too many songs with rappers on her This Is Me… Then album, though she definitely still tried to ride the wave that her big Murder Inc. remixes had created. The album’s lead single “Jenny From The Block” tried to assert that Jennifer Lopez, however glamorous she might’ve been, was still just a regular person; it pretty much just repeated the message of “I’m Real.” The song used the same sample as the Beatnuts’ 1999 goon-rap masterpiece “Watch Out Now,” and it featured the Lox’s Jadakiss and Styles P. Ben Affleck was all over the video, and he later admitted that he regretted being all over the video. (“Jenny From The Block” peaked at #3. It’s a 7. “Watch Out Now” peaked at #84.)
“All I Have,” which came out after “Jenny From The Block,” was the last song added to This Is Me… Then. Label bosses Tommy Mottola and Greg McPherson told Jennifer Lopez’s regular collaborator Cory Rooney that the LP needed one more single, and they had one in mind. A promo person had pitched McPherson on the idea of covering “Very Special,” a 1981 R&B hit for the singer Debra Laws. (“Very Special” peaked at #90 on the Hot 100, and it’s Laws’ only single that reached the big chart.) Instead of putting together a cover, though, McPherson got together with the DJ and producer Ron G, and they made a beat that sampled “Very Special.” Later on, Debra Laws tried to sue Sony over that sample, but a judge threw the lawsuit out, ruling that “Very Special” had been a work made for hire and that Laws didn’t have the rights to deny its use, since Sony had cleared the sample with Laws’ label.
GRADE: 3/10 The Number Ones: Jennifer Lopez’s “All I Have” (Feat. LL Cool J) (stereogum.com)
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