Friday, July 15, 2011

Jennifer Lopez's Wriggles atAmerican Idol Didn't Help Her Marriage

Anna Wintour, Vogue's
Editor-in-Chief, and
fashion police, wouldn't
have Lopez on the
cover of her magazine


I started a blog post on Jennifer Lopez's role as a judge at American Idol this May 28, where she sends packing talented contestants because of well, her lack of talent at perceiving talent, but I left the blog as a draft. I've tried to figure out why she's so high in the popular music radar - she sells records, people go to her shows, she's married to a successful Latino singer, who really does have a voice. The only conclusion is that she is a pushy mediocrity, who caters mostly to Hispanics, who have made her into their pop star ( in defiance of white America). Here is the unpublished post that I wrote back in May, after watching American Idol (and there were some really good talents that came out of that season's show, as I blog here):
Jennifer Lopez wriggles on the dance floor with her non-singing voice squeaking out mediocre melodies, making sure the attention is on her moves rather than her voice. Recently on the variety show American Idol, we realize that even these small town contestants with no name are infinitely better singers than Lopez. We also had to watch her perform a stripper dance while her Latino husband Mark Anthony took the stage with his English/Spanish song. Even Ryan Seacrest, the diplomatic host of the show couldn't help saying: "Is that the kind of think you do at home?" at the end of her performance.
Then this comes up just today:
Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to Divorce
I had already found her interaction with her husband strange, and her "stripper" dance in front of him sounded off alarm bells to me about their marriage.

Lopez has been married three times, and she breaks off her marriages in "spectacular" ways, as I wrote here:
she broke off in a spectacularly nutty way an engagement to Ben Affleck before marrying Anthony in very short notice [implying an affair].
She also was having an affair with Affleck while still married to her first husband.

She gave birth to twins at 39 while married to Anthony. As much as I hate to "report" rumors, I think Lopez is exempt from that concern given her erratic behavior, and rumors of her conceiving through IVF were all over the Internet. I wonder who has custody of the kids now, and where they will fall in her larger scheme of things?

About her talents as a performer, this is what I've written at my post "Mulatta Madonnas":
You can watch Jennifer Lopez performing on New Year’s Eve [with her] aggressive moves, her hostile expression and her scant clothing...
She tried her hand in perfume creation, and I compare her concoction to Sarah Jessica Parker's far superior scents here:
Coty is behind [Dior's] J'Adore's bottle design and Lopez's Glow perfume, so I wasn't so far off in the "associations" I saw between Glow [Lopez's perfume] and J'Adore. Shame on Coty, which has a long history of working with perfume bottle giants like Lalique, and creates fragrances for discerning clients!...What Coty gave Lopez is mediocrity, a mere imitation, perhaps commenting on the product as a whole. Lopez is an aggressive (Latina) celebrity, and Coty may have found it difficult to refuse her patronage.
Even her fashion sense is not appreciated by the big wigs. In this blog entry, I wrote that:
[Anna] Wintour of Vogue "refused Jennifer Lopez her Vogue cover saying that Lopez was too "low class."
Lopez and Anthony were slated to go to Latin America to start its version of Idol. That seems like a scrapped project for now, although I wouldn't be surprised if Lopez continued with it, in an effort to promote Hispanic culture in America.

So, here we have it, the Hispanic pop star who seems to have made it into the American mainstream (if J-Lo can't make it, who can?), yet who keeps clinging to her Hispanic culture, and more dangerously, waving it around at the American mainstream culture (by which I mean the dominant white Anglo Saxon). I get the feeling that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg with Lopez. And how about all those ordinary Hispanics, who I would wager follow the same desires to hold onto, and aggressively push forward, their Hispanic lifestyles?