MUSIC REVIEW:
Sure, Bring Your Family to Work
By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times
Published: October 9, 2007
"This is my first concert tour ever," Jennifer Lopez said, addressing an audience more inclined to hear that confession as good news than as a bad omen. She has released a half dozen albums - the latest, "Brave" (Epic), arrives in shops today - and scored a handful of hits, but she has never before taken her show on the road. Maybe she couldn't stop tinkering with the set list. Maybe she thought it immodest to flaunt all her abilities at once.
Or maybe she was just searching for the right opening act. And now she has found one: her husband, Marc Anthony. On Sunday night at Madison Square Garden his electrifying salsa set was merely the prelude for her pop extravaganza. And did they end the night by performing together, by drawing close and embracing? Well, if they hadn't, more than a few of the people clutching $250 tickets would probably have demanded a refund.
Like Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, the current heavyweight champions of conjugal concertry, these two know that a real-life couple can make any arena feel like a bedroom. Ms. Lopez and Mr. Anthony took this idea to its logical conclusion at the 2005 Grammy Awards, when they sang "Escapémonos" in a grand made-for-TV boudoir.
On Sunday night, during the first of two concerts scheduled for the Garden, there was no king-size bed. But their two show-closing duets, "Por Arriesgarnos" and "No Me Ames," still brought down the house. Marriage simultaneously simplified and complicated the songs; there's something pleasantly disorienting about watching a husband and wife gazing at each other while singing past each other, for the benefit of thousands of voyeurs.
No doubt some of the voyeurs were waiting for something else: The New York Post had reported that Ms. Lopez planned to make an announcement during the show; something about the state - and population - of her womb. But there was no such bombshell, though her pretty un-fierce dance moves certainly didn't dispel any rumors. Suffice it to say that this isn't Mr. Anthony's first concert tour. He hit the stage singing "Aguanilé," from the soundtrack to "El Cantante," in which he played the salsa pioneer Hector Lavoe. He found time for his biggest English-language hits, "You Sang to Me" and "I Need to Know," but this crowd cheered louder for "Preciosa" his tribute to Puerto Rico; someone tossed him a pava, a Puerto Rican straw hat, which scarcely calmed the frenzy.
All right, it's time to say it: Ms. Lopez will never out-sing her husband. But she can certainly out-celebrity him, so that's what she did. She has a voice like a diamond - it's small and often sharp - but when the beat is loud and the back-up singers are solid, she gets by just fine. And because the release date for "Brave" was still a few days away, she only sang two songs from it: the underwhelming hip-pop single "Do It Well," and "Hold It, Don't Drop It," a charming disco track for which she almost apologized. "I'm going to ease you into it, nice and slow," she said, and she called in the instruments one-by-one, creating an impromptu extended mix.
In March Ms. Lopez released her first Spanish-language album, "Como Ama una Mujer" (Epic); ballads from that album fared less well on Sunday night. But no one expects [b[]Ms. Lopez[/b] to morph into a lung-busting powerhouse, and in some ways her shaky voice may add to her appeal: on the stage of an arena (and perhaps nowhere else), the A-list star is once more an underdog, getting by with a little help from her band and her husband and a few thousand friends.
LINK:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/arts/music/09lope.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Where most people see DANGER, I see a CHALLENGE!
