One person’s view: “The contrast between the rough verses and gentle hook doesn’t work as there’s nothing that brings them together seamlessly and the relationship they’re talking about doesn’t sound like one I want.” – Nerd with an Afro
The public’s view: 2.66 / 5.00, in the bottom third of #1 hits of 2001
The entire concept of success got flipped on its head in the early 2000s. The most lucrative investments were stocks in dot-com companies with no viable plan for profitability. The guy who received the most votes lost the presidential election. And a red hot singer and actress couldn’t get her latest single to #1 until it was replaced by an inferior version that offended many of the listeners she was trying to attract.
Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real” was like an updated edition of the music that Janet Jackson had made in the 1980s, effortlessly wafting across the boundaries of pop, dance, and R&B. This pleasantly harmless trifle of a song was perfectly suited for radio, but J. Lo’s management couldn’t care less whether the bumpkins out in Fly Over Land enjoyed hearing the track on their AM top 40 outlets. Her label expected to sell only three or four CDs in all of Iowa; the real money was in the big cities along the coasts. For the J. Lo album to go octuple platinum, “I’m Real” needed a hip-hop remix by someone with a deep sense of musical craftsmanship. No such person was available, so the job was given to Ja Rule.
Ja Rule decided to change the parameters of the assignment. Instead of remixing J. Lo’s hit, he composed an entirely new song with the same title. And instead of doing a guest rap on one verse, as was the custom, he wrote himself into the new version on equal footing with the woman who was supposed to be the star. The resulting duet was dubbed the “Murder Remix” of “I’m Real”. The “Remix” part was a misnomer, as this was a total rewrite, but “Murder” was accurate because Ja Rule had managed to kill anything that was interesting about the original song. He eliminated the catchy melody and added a Rick James sample that wears thin after being repeated in the background for four minutes. It is the lyrics, though, that earn “I’m Real (Murder Remix)” a spot in the museum of “Bad” #1 Hits.
Ja Rule comes across as a thug on this track, but not a motivated type of thug who hustles to sell drugs or who gets into violent feuds with other rappers. He can’t even be bothered to brag about his wealth or his sexual abilities, because that would require energy. Instead, he just sits around and smokes so much weed that he forgets his own name and has to ask what it is. J. Lo says she can’t go on without him, but never explains what attracts her to such a useless boyfriend. She uses most of her lines to complain about other men, which suggests that she is settling for this guy because everyone else she knows is worse. We are supposed to accept that the beautiful Jennifer Lopez can do no better than a dull stoner who calls her a “bitch”, but it isn’t plausible.
As Lopez’s label promoted Ja Rule’s rewritten track to urban radio stations, some of them pushed back against the transparent attempt to curry their favor. J. Lo had previously marketed her music to suburban soccer moms, and now she was trying to have it both ways – literally, in fact, by releasing two different songs under the same title. Disc jockeys at New York’s Hot 97 saw this as an insult, and they led a protest against Lopez’s needless use of the n-word in the “Murder Remix”. At every appearance that J. Lo made in support of her single, she was forced to wearily utter some variation of the line “I am not a racist.” When you’re having to say things like that on a promotional tour, maybe it’s best to just stay home.
The “Murder Remix” could be considered a catastrophe by many measures. On the Billboard Hot 100, however, it was a huge success. Ja Rule had stumbled into a loophole in the chart’s methodology. Because his song was titled as a remix of “I’m Real”, it was credited with the airplay points from J. Lo’s original version as well as its own airplay. Neither track was probably strong enough to hit #1 by itself, but this glitch in the formula allowed the “Murder Remix” to spend five weeks on top. It worked out so well that J. Lo and Ja Rule repeated the stunt with “Ain’t It Funny” and “Ain’t It Funny (Murder Remix)”, prompting Billboard to introduce a new rule – the Ja Rule Rule, you could call it – to prevent another recurrence.
By the topsy-turvy standards of the new millennium, “I’m Real” is the perfectly ironic title for J. Lo’s endeavor. What else could you call a song about an unrealistic and unrelatable romance, written as a cynical marketing ploy and then used in an artificial scheme to manipulate the singles charts? It’s the audacity of it all, rather than any artistic merit, that makes it intriguing.
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