Jenny on the rocks - Lopez hits career slump

Jenny on the rocks - Lopez hits career slump

By David Usborne in New York

Published: 06 April 2007 in the Indepentdent

When a big celebrity is hired to make a special appearance on a weekly television show, you can usually be sure it's because the producers need a ratings boost. Sometimes, however, it works both ways, like when Jennifer Lopez graces the stage on American Idol next week to perform a song from her new album.

For Lopez, 38, the richest and most influential Hispanic artist in the US, appears to be suffering a bit of a slump. She has two films that have yet to be released in cinemas and the first sales reports on the album suggest it is destined to be a dud.

Advance buzz about the record had been intense. Called Como Ama Una Mujer (How a Woman Loves), it is Lopez's first album recorded entirely in Spanish, reflecting her roots as the daughter of Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx. Lopez, whose third husband is the pop singer Marc Anthony, is far from alone in trying to tap into a burgeoning Hispanic market, with 32 million Spanish speakers in the US. Another of the native-Hispanic pop singers who have begun including Spanish tracks on their albums is Shakira. Yet, according to www.hitsdailydouble.com, Lopez's new record sold a meagre 49,452 units in its first week, barely making the top 10 and falling behind Sir Elton John's greatest hits.

The record's disappointing numbers are already prompting disparaging headlines about the state of her career, such as "J-Low" and "La Bomba". These knocks are coming just as she is giving numerous interviews to boost the album and her career.

It is the hardly the first time that the professional obituaries on Lopez have been written, however. She and her one-time fiancé, Ben Affleck, were savaged for the 2003 film Gigli, by critical consensus one of the worst films ever visited upon the cinema-going populace.

Nor did her last album, Get Right, which was in English, do well. In fact, by most standards it was a retail disaster. In her defence, of course, the entire CD industry is in a funk, with labels unable to find ways of reversing declines as consumers flee record shops for music via the internet.

But she has not been helped by the Ritmo Latin chain of music shops announcing last week that it was refusing to sell the new album because Lopez had declined to make promotional appearances in any of its 50 shops. "We've supported her from the beginning," fulminated Ritmo's president David Massry. "Now we're told by her record company she will only visit Anglo retail outlets."

The humiliation of Gigli was not enough to kill off an acting career that started quite promisingly in the 1997 film Selena, for which Lopez was rewarded with a Golden Globe nomination. Yet the omens are dark for her two new films. Nobody has been found to distribute Bordertown, which co-stars Antonio Banderas. The second, El Cantante, which has Anthony as the co-star, has had its release date pushed back until August, in spite of mostly kind reviews at the Toronto Film Festival.

Lopez will be hoping for a boost from her appearance on American Idol, which has long reigned as the most-watched primetime show on American television. But here her timing might be off, too. Idol is also suffering a slump in ratings, with audience figures down 7 per cent.