Songoftheday 11/3/23 - It's such a shame but I'm leaving, can't take the way you're mistreating me...

 

 

"All I Have" - Jennifer Lopez featuring LL Cool J

from the album This Is Me...Then (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (four weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 20

 

Today's song comes from Jennifer Lopez, who returned to the pop top ten at the close of 2002 with the self-indulgent "Jenny From The Block".  For the second single from the record, Lopez and Epic Records aimed at continuing her successful string of collaborations with rappers like Ja Rule and Nas that granted her two #1's and a top ten hit. However those were reinventions of songs from her sophomore album J.-Lo, but this would be written specifically as a hip-hop song. "All I Have" was written by the committee of Makeba Riddick, Curtis Richardson, and producer Ron "G" Bowser along with Jennifer and the featured rapper LL Cool J (James Smith), using an interpolation of Debra Laws' 1981 soul hit "Very Special", giving William Jeffrey and Lisa Peters writing credit. LL Cool J was just coming off a comeback himself, returning to the top ten in the autumn of 2002 with "Luv U Better". The production from Ron G and Cory Rooney is paced like a love song, but the lyrics have the pair in the midst of breaking up, with J-Lo cooing that she's made up her mind and he'll be fine, but LL comes in trying to bargain for her to come back in the soothing tone that set his breakthrough hit "I'm In Love" a decade and a half prior. The result is nice as long as you don't pay attention, and for mainstream radio, that's always happening, so the pair found themselves with a huge hit, with LL landing his first and only #1 success on the "big" chart...

"All I Have" became Lopez's fourth chart-topper on Billboard magazine's Hot 100 in February of 2003, while making it to #4 on their R&B Singles list. On the radio, the song spent a month (four weeks) on top of the Mainstream Top-40 chart, and peaking at #4 on the Mainsteram R&B radio list, and took two weeks at #1 on the dance/R&B oriented Rhythmic format. Internationally, the single topped the charts in New Zealand and Croatia, and reached the top ten in the United Kingdom (#2), Australia (#2), Switzerland (#4), the Netherlands (#5), Canada (#6 Sales), Ireland (#7), and Portugal (#9). It also made the top-40 in Italy (#13), Sweden (#15), Belgium (#16 Wallonia/#18 Flanders), Germany (#19), France (#29), Romania (#37), and Austria (#38).

In response, Laws tried to sue for use of the sample, but since the songwriters and the record company who owns the rights to her record Elektra granted permission, it was stifled in the court. 

Both Jennifer and this album as well as LL Cool J will be back to the series, and eventually together one more time.

(5/10)

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J-Lo and LL performed the song on The Today Show in 2003...

The pair also reunited for the Global Citizen concert in 2021...

and lastly, Lopez joined the rapper on his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame that same year...

Tomorrow I'll have my top tunes of THIS week, and on Monday SOTD will be back with that infamous song from that boyband member who was trashed in that recent memoir.