Jennifer Lopez

Jennifer Lopez’s canny ability to bring the Nuyorican soundtrack of her upbringing to the global stage has defined her career. It was never more apparent than in 2020's Superbowl LIV halftime performance, where she celebrated Puerto Rican pride in a thrilling, rhythm-heavy extravaganza. Blending uptown brass with brown-eyed soul and R&B, the multi-hyphenate artist brings her Latin freestyle edge to pop and hip-hop, always staying on the vanguard through savvy collaborations with French Montana, DJ Khaled, and Cardi B. Born in The Bronx in 1969, Jennifer Lynn Lopez started out in musical theatre as a child before she made waves as a Fly Girl dancer on In Living Color and then as an actress on the silver screen. Just after rising to fame with her acclaimed role as the late Tejano queen Selena, Lopez released her first single, 1999’s dance-pop banger “If You Had My Love”. Lopez welcomed funkier grooves and declared her hometown pride with 2002’s “Jenny from the Block”. She displayed her biculturalism and more romantic side on albums like 2007’s Como Ama una Mujer, but she proved she could still amp up the party when she teamed up with Pitbull for the EDM-heavy “On the Floor”. Over the decades, the performer has continued to embrace her lively funk sensibility, as evidenced by 2019’s “Medicine” single. “You gravitate to what you know, to what feels comfortable and what feels good [...] That funk, those instruments, that’s what makes me move,” Lopez told Apple Music. “That percussion and brass live inside my blood. That’s what I grew up with, and that’s who I am at my core. It’s always going to be an influence.” For 2024's This Is Me...Now—the follow-up to her 2002 album that was inspired, in part, by her then-new romance with Ben Affleck—she went back to the original source material: a collection of love letters that he had held on to after they broke up and given to her after they reconciled nearly two decades later. That year she also performed an Apple Music Live session in Los Angeles.