17 February 2005
It’s funny how sometimes an act’s number one singles aren’t their best-known tracks. If ever Songs By Jennifer Lopez comes up on Family Fortunes, the big scorers would surely be the likes of ‘Jenny From The Block’, ‘If You Had My Love’ and ‘Love Don’t Cost A Thing’, none of which topped the Irish charts and only the last of which was a UK number one. ‘Get Right’ might be a good answer in the early rounds of Pointless, though. Aide-mémoire: it’s the one with the video (below) where she plays lots of characters at a nightclub.
Another reason for some of those other songs being better known was their context of being released during the whole early-’00s J-Lo and Ben Affleck celebrity-couple media circus. (They even had the de rigueur composite coupledom name: Bennifer.) Much like Britney’s videos for ‘Everytime’ and ‘My Prerogative’, ‘Jenny From The Block’ also addresses this in its promo clip. So, in that sense J-Lo and Britney have parallel ’00s pop careers, as well as the usual problem of our sexist, capitalist pop-cultural paradigm profiting nicely by piling onto any woman in the public eye.
Also in parallel to this part of Jennifer Lopez’s pop career: the ’00s ascendancy of Beyoncé. With its ’70s horn sample, sprightly R&B-pop rhythm, insistent chorus and string of uh-ohs, ‘Get Right’ tracks ‘Crazy In Love’ to the last. J-Lo’s is the lesser record, though: the uh-ohs are catchy but formulaic, the sample is twee and generic, and the tune is featureless. Perhaps ‘featureless’ is just about all-things-to-all-listeners enough to get this right to the top of our charts.
Irish Number Ones 