Jennifer Lopez – Baila Conmigo

Sorry J.Lo… let’s check back in at the Super Bowl, hm?

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[4.50]Will Adams: Piggybacking off a mostly instrumental viral hit from earlier this year, J.Lo seeks a bop and draws a blank. Her presence is welcome in spots — I like the interplay between her inviting vocal and the two-note horn melody during the verse — but otherwise makes “Baila Conmigo” less a straightforward banger like “Calabria” and more decent trifle like “Mr. Saxobeat.”
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Iain Mew: It’s about as routine and thin as a banger can get, but Jennifer Lopez doesn’t let it show too much, and the horn-flavoured compressed noise gets space for a decent workout.
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Nortey Dowuona: A beached horn loop gasps as Jennifer tries to forklift it into the basic reggaeton building block box, then scatters the bits on the wrong beats, with occasional baby waves lapping at the pieces and withdrawing them off the beach. Then another zipping synth line flops on the beach, with fully developed gills, and starts devouring beachgoers while Jennifer quietly lets the forklift be swallowed by the waves and goes home.
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Julian Axelrod: Jennifer Lopez gave an Oscar-worthy performance in a late summer erotic crime comedy and dropped the most serviceable banger of summer 2019 in October. Time is irrelevant to J. Lo, who will still be making bilingual bops long after society has crumbled to dust.
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Alfred Soto: Her assured work in Hustlers persuaded me to give “Baila Conmigo” the second chance I didn’t think it deserved. Doubletracking her vocal disengages her from the canned percussion track, as if she couldn’t be bothered.
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Katherine St Asaph: The marketing of Hustlers, as all such marketing does, presented Jennifer Lopez as Triple Threat Icon — then awkwardly elided, since it had to, the fact that her career over the past two decades has comprised less-than-iconic repertoire, for which she did little, delivered at spotty intervals without much of a quality curve. Which is a successful hustle, I guess.
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