For a variety of reasons, one of the biggest stories in entertainment this year has been the precarious state of Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me… Now” tour, which was finally put out of its misery yesterday.
The tour, announced in February, came as part of “This Is Me… Now,” a massive, self-celebrating and honestly rather hubristic album/ tour/ two-film project essentially about herself and her romantic reunion with actor Ben Affleck. The films did reasonably well but the album landed with a thud, and before long word crept out that ticket sales for the tour were poor, borne out by Ticketmaster seating charts — which, along with insider reports and rumors, are really the only way for most humans to see how a tour is selling.
As the reports continued, Lopez quietly rebranded the tour to be more about her career’s substantial hits than the new album, and tickets were selling well in a few markets — but terribly in most of them. And yesterday, on a beautiful Spring Friday — which is the ideal time to break embarrassing news — the shoe finally dropped: The tour had been canceled so that she could spend more time with family and friends. No reason for this need was officially stated (“more time with family” is usually what politicians or CEOs say when they’re stepping down from their posts for other, much more embarrassing reasons), but the tabloids were quick to connect it with reports that she and Affleck are splitting. Sources close to the singer were quick to insist how well the tour was doing in markets like New York and Los Angeles, while avoiding how disastrously it was apparently doing in most others.
Just a few days earlier, another major act canceled their own overly ambitious North American tour that was scheduled to hit many of the same arenas that J-Lo’s was — the male rock duo the Black Keys. After that news broke, people asked what that said about the state of the touring business.
But when J. Lo canceled her tour just days later, people asked what it says about her.
“Didn’t she know she had a family when she made tour plans?” one online commentator wrote. “She’s ‘heartsick’ because she couldn’t sell those tickets,” another said. “‘Family’ is a easy go-to for liars”; “Further proof that her marriage is a publicity stunt,” etc.
As a society, why do we do that?
Broadly speaking, the reasons for both cancellations are the same: An artist past their commercial prime makes an overly optimistic projection about the response to their new project, gets it wrong, and pays the price — as do their partners in the enterprise, from promoters and venues down to dancers and truck drivers, because it takes a village to put on a tour of that size, and literally hundreds of people’s livelihoods are affected by those cancelations (which is something conveniently forgotten in the thinly veiled glee much of the public seems to take in such missteps).
Granted, the pop audience that J-Lo is targeting is very different from the more-loyal, less-fickle rock fans the Black Keys were aiming at. The pop world that J-Lo inhabits has the attention span of a smart fish and is infamously unforgiving of perceived transgressions, which can span from intentional factors — like a romantic partner who fans decide they don’t like — to unintended ones like, say, a multifaceted, self-absorbed autobiographical project by someone who famously is not the world’s kindest or most gracious superstar. For all her Bronx toughness and swagger, J-Lo has always been a pop artist and she knows that game and everything that comes with it.
But fame and power put people at a remove from reality, and it’s ultimately irrelevant whether everyone in her orbit also thought all this project and tour were a great idea, or whether no one dared to say, “Hey, after the disastrous failure of ‘Gigli’” — the dreadful 2003 Affleck-Lopez film that not only destroyed the pair as a commercial property, but also helped tank the first era of their relationship — “maybe reviving Bennifer as a commercial enterprise isn’t a great idea?” The end result was the same: a canceled tour and a stiff album. Artists make similar miscalculations every year.
Yet the online venom and hateration that has surrounded the failure of this enterprise has been epic in scale. The term schadenfreude — a combination of the German nouns Schaden, meaning “damage” or “harm,” and Freude, meaning “joy,” per Merriam-Webster — means taking pleasure, often illogical pleasure, in others’ misfortune. And while men certainly are the victims of it — does anyone remember Martin Shkreli and his unusually punchable face? — society certainly seems to reserve the worst of its venom for powerful, successful, talented women.
It’s a matter of public record that women’s rights are under ferocious attack, from Iran, Afghanistan and Russia to the United States and our arguably corrupt Supreme Court, multiple state governments and even Benedictine College’s commencement. But the hate isn’t coming exclusively from men. At a certain point, we decide we don’t like a public figure anymore without really knowing — or at least without consciously thinking about — why.
Why do we do this to women so often? Is it because the fairer, weaker sex (sarcasm hopefully obvious) makes an easier target? Is it because we somehow resent the fact that women gave all of us life? Is it because science continues to prove that women are actually stronger than men in nearly every way except (usually) physical strength, and there’s some desire for control and putting strong women “in their place”?
Except subconsciously, it’s probably not that deep. Sometimes we just don’t like or get tired of someone’s face (cf. Shkreli, who never had a chance), sometimes we resent their success, sometimes we also resent their happiness, or at least their seeming flaunting of it. In the wider public eye, J-Lo seems to have run afoul of the latter two, and the rumors that she and Affleck may be separating after less than two years of marriage seem an almost inevitable final act before a (probably equally inevitable) redemption chapter, after everyone finally realizes how unfair they were (cf. Britney Spears).
This is a road that Beyonce also went down at the peak of her career. She (apparently) shared the challenges that her own marriage was facing — and intensified her already-deep connection with her audience — in the lyrics of her galvanizing “Lemonade” album and tour… but then made a sort of happy-ending follow-up with her 2018 duet album with husband Jay-Z, “Everything Is Love,” which landed well initially but in retrospect is self-indulgent, treacly and awkwardly self-congratulatory: It’s just hard to have much empathy for two near-billionaires singing about how difficult it was coming through the fire. Their ruling status — and the fact that people are genuinely afraid of their fanbases — enabled them to dodge the storm that usually follows such hubris.