This Is Me Then Music Cd

Jennifer Lopez - This Is Me Then

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This Is Me...Then      Artist : Jennifer Lopez      List Price : $11.98 USD        Your Price : $11.98 USD      ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 2002-11-26      Studio : Sony      Label : Sony      Avg. Customer Rating : (634 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for This Is Me Then      Great Album!      Rating:      I don't consider myself a J-Lo fan. Every now and then she releases a good single, but I don't leap for joy when a new J-Lo record hits stores. I happened to over hear this record in a friends car and I liked most of what I heard, so I decided to buy the album for myself. For the most part, I was pleased with this record. This album is very urban. Jennifer samples from several hip-hop tracks and delivers great beats on a lot of the tracks. She strays away from her Latin roots a little and approaches a more R&B style in her music, which I love. I'm shocked at the number of bad reviews this album has gotten. It is a good solid record. Most of the songs have great beats and catchy melodies. There are also some great ballads. "Dear Ben" is a beautiful tribute to...well you know. And although the relationship failed, the song does not. J-Lo's soft voice is incredibly pure and captivating. This album pulls you in from start to finish. There are a couple of road bumps along the way. "You Belong to Me" and "I've Been Thinkin" are a little to dull for my liking. However the rest of the album is pure gold. Highly recommended.     Customer Reviews for This Is Me Then Cd      Better than Britney, Ashanti, etc, with a few catchy cuts, but still uses too many damn samples!      Rating:      If Jennifer Lopez can be given recent credit for anything, it's staying married to the same guy for 3 1/2 years and adopting a lower, somewhat more respectable profile than she used to have. This album, which is from a time when she was still quite hate-worthy, has a couple of OK songs, but is still more of a marketing scheme than a bonafide artistic masterpiece. On top of that it does have a couple of downright atrocious songs. "Still" is pretty good, "Loving You" is half-decent as long as you've never heard of Mtume, "Baby I Love You" is a nice understated piece, and the hit "I'm Glad" is fun, though like any song, they could've gotten by without samples. On "All I Have" a very self righteous Jennifer rips into her boyfriend (or husband) accusing him of cheating on her, and is absolutely adamant about not giving him another chance, despite the fact that she alludes to nothing that absolutely proves that he's guilty. Even a guest spot by legendary rapper LL Cool J can't save this one. Even more atrocious is "Jenny From The Block" which uses at least 2 different samples and has Jennifer insisting that success hasn't gone to her head. It's almost like she's bragging, because anyone who was familiar with Jennifer Lopez in 2002 knows that she absolutely had allowed success to go to her head. Editorial Reviews for This Is Me Then Audio Cd      Amazon.com      Between her first and second albums, Jennifer Lopez moved from sharp hip-hop to a slicker sound that captured the sass and heat of the streets, thanks mainly to the production acumen of her erstwhile boyfriend Sean "Puffy" Combs. On her third album, This Is Me ... Then, Lopez shows she's just as facile as her ex in changing names as well as musical personas. She abandons the impish J-Lo moniker for a more benign, and less interesting, Jenny, who makes an appearance on "Jenny from the Block." Here, Lopez insists she is still the same down-to-earth girl who emerged from the Bronx a decade before mega-stardom hit: "I used to have a little/ Now I have a lot," she chirps before cautioning, "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got/ I'm still Jenny from the block." The claim stretches credibility given her well-documented status as a diva, but "Jenny" shows more pizzazz and humor on the album than anything else, except for her saucy duet with LL Cool J on "All I Have." Elsewhere, the album--which includes nine songs cowritten by Lopez--serves up a recycled paean to '70s soul, an anemic cover of Carly Simon's vituperative "You Belong to Me," and cloying ballads inspired by her new fiancé, actor Ben Affleck. Lopez dedicated the disc to the actor and includes a far-too-personal and gooey love song to him titled "Dear Ben." In it, she declares: "You'll always be my lust, my love, my man, my child, my friend and my king." There's plenty of love here, but what's missing is the verve and crackle of Lopez's earlier stuff. --Jaan Uhelszki