Among the most significant events in entertainment this year has been the unstable situation of Jennifer Lopez’s Canceled Tour ‘This Is Me… Now’ tour, which was formally terminated yesterday.
The tour was announced in February as part of ‘This Is Me… Now,’ a self-loving and perhaps overly self-kind musical, concert, double movie feature, and now, marriage and divorce with, of all people, actor Ben Affleck.
The films did fairly decently, the album crashed and burned, and soon there were whispers that ticket sales for the tour were low; the only sources most people could go by were Ticketmaster seating arrangements, and idle talk and gossip.
Lopez went on to shift the focus of the tour from the album to iconic moments of her career when the news was still coming in, and tickets for the show were selling fairly well in some places but not at all in most others.
The tour had been cancelled so that she could spend more time with family and friends. There was no official explanation for this need; stating “I want to spend more time with my family” is what politicians or CEOs usually say when they are forced to resign for other, much more shameful reasons, but the sheet did not take much time to link it to information that she and Affleck are getting a divorce.
Friends of the singer were quick to explain that the tour was performing well in places like New York and L. A but did not explain how badly the tour appeared to be doing in all the other places.
Just a few days earlier, another major act had to axe their own overly ambitious North American tour, planned for many of the same venues as J-Lo’s—the Black Keys, a male rock duo. People wanted to know what that meant for the state of the tour business after that.
But people want to know what it said about her when Jennifer Lopez cancelled her tour just days later.
As one online judge put it: “Could not she comprehend that she has a family to attend to when making tour plans? “Jennifer Lopez’s because she could not sell those tickets,” another said. There are general captions such as “‘Family’ is an easy go-to for liars”; “Further proof that her marriage is a publicity stunt,” etc.
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As a society, why do we do that?
The reasons for both cancellations are the same: when an artist past their commercial peak releases a new product, over-eager fans will turn up in droves for a concert tour, which is proven wrong, and suffers the effect—so do others — event organizers, promoters, venues, caterers, dancers, truck drivers and many others whose income depend on these big-scale concerts and who are left jobless when such tours are cancelled, which is something that people often conveniently forget when joy.
Of course, it has to be admitted that the pop audience J-Lo is appealing to is quite different from the more extreme and less changeable rock audience the Black Keys were trying to attract. The pop world J-Lo lives in has the shortest memory span of a fish that is claimed to be smart, and is harsh in trying the star for whatever sins they are believed to have committed; intentional or unintentional, and here we have one in the latter category. For all her Bronxian attitude and balls, J-Lo has remained a pop tart and she understands pop and all its modifiers.
Fame and power separate people from reality, and it does not matter if everyone around her also believed that all this project and tour were good, and no one could say, “Hey, remember ‘Gigli’” — the terrible 2003 film with Affleck and Lopez that not only dealt a fatal blow to their cinematic chemistry but also tested the first heyday of their romance.
The expression that has been ejecting and casting at this failure has been outstanding over the internet. More specifically, the term malicious joy, derived from the German words Schaden, which means ‘damage,’ ‘harm,’ or ‘injury,’ and Freude, which means ‘joy,’ according to Merriam-Webster, refers to taking pleasure in others’ bad luck. And while men are certainly on the receiving end of it — does anyone recall Martin Shkreli and his weirdly reserved special token 254 able face? — society perhaps port the worst of its dislike for talented, powerful, and successful women.
It is a matter of record that women’s rights are under severe threat, be it Iran, Afghanistan, Russia or the United States and its rather sinful Supreme Court, multiple state legislatures, and yes, Benedictine College commencement. But the hate is not coming just from men, folks.
Why do we do this to women so often?
Is it because it is easier to discredit the fairer, weaker sex temper that is, hopefully, evident? Is it because we tend to feel anger at the fact that women are the ones who bore all of us into the world? Is it because science now shows women to be biologically superior to men in almost all aspects barring brute force, and there is still that psychological need to dominate strong women and keep them low?
If not something that is just below your awareness, it is most likely not as great as all of that. Sometimes we do not like a person or simply get bored of his face as with who did not have a chance, sometimes we are jealous, sometimes we also jealous of their success, sometimes we are jealous and sometimes we are also jealous of their happiness when they are a show of it.
This is a road that Beyonce also took at the peak of her career.
How does society’s reaction to Jennifer Lopez’s tour cancellation reflect deeper biases?
As we are seeing, Jennifer Lopez has not escaped from those bullets. At 54, she’s at a tricky point in a pop star career: Singles to artists at that age are as short as Loch Ness, Cher’s “Believe” released 25 years ago, and Kylie Minogue’s ‘Padam Padam,’ at the time, and only generation-defining artist with long string of hits like Paul McCartney, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Billy Joel, can headline arenas at that age. What has not been included in that category? Women.
All the leading female explore artists – Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Pink – are below 45 years of age. The only exception is Madonna who, at the age of 65, performed to fairly sized crowds during her recently concluded, mostly successful, “Celebration” tour. She has survived all the above storms- and even more- and made it, but it has taken the force of a storm, the force of a once-in-a-lifetime type of drive and has probably cost her a lot personally as well.
Some people most likely get up in the morning, grab their phones and just hope to capture a video clip of Taylor Swift — the most successful and all-over female entertainer of this age — slip and fall on stage during any one of her packed, multibillion-dollar-yielding “Eras” tour shows. Why?
Perhaps to point up that she is not flawless? Because we are sick of her success and resent her happiness? Or does it somehow make us feel better about our failures—and what does that say about us?
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Jennifer Lopez’s Canceled Tour Ticket
Jennifer Lopez’s Canceled Tour ticket sales were reported like dogs on a bone, not because of the indirect thrill of watching a celebrity fail but because stories like these matter in our sphere of media and it is just a fact that the mean gets way more views than the nice. Her fans surrounded us which is assured if you are in public, but the stories proved to be highly popular.
As it does every time misfortune piles up on a female public figure, I was reminded of something: In the period that Lena Dunham stood tall with her show “Girls”, there was this YouTube thing – for lack of a better term, a meme of young ladies making silly, sarcastic statements about the show, with one of the ladies saying.
It was a joke, but that statement felt like the accurate representation of the lack of effort, let alone thinking, let alone logic that goes into the kind of dislike being aimed at Jennifer Lopez and the countless other women in the public eye. One can also easily assume that syndrome comes into play with many other successful women being cubed after people just don’t like her, at least: the defeat of Hillary Clinton with a strong matches woman-hater in 2016.
I like Jennifer Lopez’s as an artist and she will be OK, she is very strong enough to handle all of this. But why should she have to? There is so much more to this than just the cancellation of a tour and one cannot help but think whether the guilty pleasure of indulging and our contribution to it is not a negative situation that exists beyond a few meaningless clicks.