Songoftheday 10/15/21 - Now if I give you me this is how it's got to be, first of all I won't take your cheating on me...
"If You Had My Love" - Jennifer Lopez
from the album On The 6 (1999)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (five weeks)
Weeks in the Top-40: 20
Today's song is from multi-hyphenate celebrity Jennifer Lopez, Growing up in the Bronx, Lopez sang, acted, and danced as a child, but would first go on to pursue a dance career. Studying dance in Manhattan, she gigged with a lot of productions and musical acts through the early 1990s before Jennifer landed her big break as a dancer on the TV comedy show In Living Color, where she stayed for four seasons. After that, Lopez being acting in movies of increasing impact starting with small indies and moving rather quickly to starring aside the likes of Robin Williams (Jack) and Jack Nicholson (Blood and Wine). But her breakthrough role would be playing the recently murdered Tejano music star Selena in the movie Selena in 1997, for which she got rave reviews for her performance. Although Lopez didn't sing but lip-synched Selena's originals for the movie, she was signed by Tommy Mottola (about to be ex-Mr. Mariah Carey) to Columbia Records' Work Group label as a mainstream pop artist, rather than a Latin act. That's important to note for her debut album, for although Jennifer rode the wave that carried Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and herself to fame in America, as opposed to the other two her initial debut was much more in the vein that gave us Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys.
"If You Have My Love", written by producer Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins with Mark Cory Rooney and LaShawn Daniels, starts with the same plucky synth-guitars that began TLC's "No Scrubs", before settling into a mid-tempo groove where Lopez sings about what she requires in her man. But everything is done in generalities, of "being true", and "fulfilling all my dreams". I mean, any smooth talking man would seem to get past this pretty easily. And with Lopez sticking to a safe register and not really vacillating that much (there were even rumors floating around that she didn't sing at all which I don't believe), it could have been anybody singing this. In fact, judging from the liberal amount of "yuh yuh yuhs" on the record, if it wasn't for Britney's age, it probably would've went to her first. It's slick, but very late-90's safe, and you'd be fooled by the music video, which inserts a frantic Latin-style instrumental break from the Pablo Flores remix that's not on the radio version (probably for the Ricky momentum), into thinking its more interesting than what it is. Speaking of the video, it's a cringeworthy display of Jennifer playing the AOL-speed age version of the webcam girl, cutting to a guy who's doing who knows what to her being in the bathroom, right to a little girl twirling around in her bedroom. It's technically savvy for its time, but in retrospect looks even as dated as it is just odd...
Nevertheless, "If You Had My Love" definitely reached its intended target in both young girls and older men, and it became her first #1 pop hit in June of 1999. The song also crossed over to both the R&B chart (#6) and older-skewing Adult Top-40 (#32) charts in Billboard magazine. The dance remixes of the track, done by Jerkins as well as Latin-styled reinventions by Pablo Flores, helped it rise to #5 on the Dance Club Play list. Internationally, the single was just as massive, topping the charts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Greece, and Hungary. It also made the top ten in the Netherlands (#2), Iceland (#2), Belgium (#3W/#9F), the UK (#4), France (#4), Italy (#4), Ireland (#4), Germany (#5), Switzerland (#5), Spain (#7), Norway (#7), and Sweden (#9). The On the 6 album, released as the single was peaking in June of that year, rose to #8 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, going on to sell over three million copies. Both Jennifer and the album will be back to the series soon.
(4/10)
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Here's the remix of the song from Pablo Flores that definitely amps up the Latin flair with the horns, and makes the bland song at least a bit more interesting, though I still think it sounds like someone is playing her record and a Miami Sound Machine record at the same time...
Here she is at the BRIT Awards in 1999
Fast forward to her Let's Get Loud concert from 2003...
And lastly, just this past month on the Global Citizen Live charity show, doing "If You Had My Love", "Love Don't Cost A Thing", and "I'm Glad"...
Up tomorrow: Canadian crossover star asserts her estrogen.
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