The Story of Lola, Jennifer Lopez's Sasha Fierce
Behind J.Lo's abandoned alter ego, a doomed label, and a forgotten #1 record
WHO IS LOLA?
That was the question attached to a video that premiered online October 7, 2009, featuring a silhouetted dancing figure and links to a briefly mysterious website and Twitter account. I use the word “briefly” because there was virtually little to no time before the identity of Lola was revealed – Lola was Jennifer Lopez, just with a slightly more sexed-up attitude and horrible wig. After the promo video was leaked to blogs, fans immediately connected Lola to J.Lo and dug up the song recorded under the Lola persona. “Fresh Out The Oven” was leaked online the same day as the Lola promo video, and bloggers immediately criticized Lopez for adopting an alter ego less than a year after Beyoncé’s mega-success with Sasha Fierce. Damage control had to be done quickly.
Amanda Ghost, the then-President of Lopez’s then-label, Epic Records, immediately released a statement, saying that the song was just “a hot club record that the label loved and Jennifer thought was fun,” Typically, a label doesn’t throw tens of thousands of dollars into a song, its visual, and a promotional campaign just for fun, a sentiment confirmed a month earlier by Pitbull, who was featured on the song in his first-ever collaboration with Lopez. In an interview with MTV backstage at the 2009 VMA’s, Pitbull told the network that he had worked on a song called “Lola,” set to be released as the first single from Lopez’s new album.
So who was Lola, and what did this song have to do with J.Lo’s new album?
Brave New World
In 2007, Lopez released her sixth studio album Brave, which was a commercial and critical disaster. The album’s lead single, “Do It Well,” attempted to recreate the relative success of Lopez’s “Get Right” by incorporating big band instrumentation with more club-friendly beats. While “Get Right” managed to climb to #12 at its highest chart position, “Do It Well” meandered its way to #31 before dropping steeply in the following weeks. Despite positive critical reception, a second single failed to scratch the Hot 100 at all. Brave was Lopez’s first album to debut outside of the Top 10, selling just 52,600 copies in its first week, a massive decline compared to her 2005’s Rebirth, which sold 261,000 copies in the first-week run. Rolling Stone’s Caryn Ganz called Brave an album filled with “undanceable midtempo duds,” with some critics wondering if this was the end of J.Lo the singer.
The success of Lopez’s next studio project was critical to the longevity of her career. Though her beauty and acting ventures were still doing well, another flop album could be the nail in the coffin for her music career. In a post-Gaga world that saw the pop industry turned on its head by bold new efforts from emerging artists and a sonic shift towards an upbeat, dance-pop sound, Lopez was in desperate need of a shot in the arm, creatively.
Enter Amanda Ghost, a songwriter who most notably co-penned James Blunt’s inescapable 2005 hit “You’re Beautiful” and the Beyoncé/Shakira showstopper “Beautiful Liar,” now the new president of Lopez’s label, Epic Records. Ghost’s hiring came as a surprise to many, as she had virtually no experience in the business side of the industry. “I’m not a conventional choice as an executive in the music business,” she said in a press release. “But it is a testament to the new mood at Sony [Epic’s parent company] where content is now king and the music business is being put back in the hands of creative talent such as myself.”
During her brief tenure at the label, Ghost attempted to use her success as a former songwriter to justify a more hands-on approach with artists, often bringing songs she had penned herself to Epic’s roster, encouraging artists to record them. “The music business is the Wild West right now, so I’m ripping up the rule book and starting again,” she said in an interview with Rolling Stone. Ghost’s management style was notorious for being arrogant and insistent, rumors later swirled that Sara Bareilles’ “King of Anything” was written with Ghost in mind after she tried to push Bareilles’ sophomore album in a direction she felt would be more successful for the label.
Tasked with breathing life into the career of one of Epic’s most profitable artists, Ghost brought Jennifer Lopez “Fresh Out The Oven,” a song she wrote specifically for her. Initially, Lopez refused the song, saying that it didn’t fit with the type of material she had been recording for her as-yet-untitled seventh album. But with Epic hemorrhaging money and Lopez’s music career stagnant, Ghost was determined.
So, she devised a plan.
Confident in the song’s ability to be a hit, Ghost looked to the industry for trends to mimic, finding clear inspiration in the raging success of Beyoncé’s I Am…Sasha Fierce, an album still holding strong on the charts months after its release. In an attempt to capitalize on the alter ego trend, Ghost convinced Lopez to record “Fresh Out The Oven” and release it under the pseudonym, Lola, with a viral campaign around based on the mysterious new persona. The website set up for Lola made a bold claim: “Lola has reinvented sexy.”
But with comparisons and criticisms mounting in the blogosphere immediately after the campaign launched on October 7, Epic wasted no time getting ahead of the story, confirming that Lola and Lopez were one and the same but insisting that the song was merely a buzz record that wouldn’t be on the album. “It’s a fun track she did for the streets,” a source told the New York Daily News. Amanda Ghost doubled down, telling People, “Jennifer and Pitbull got together and the record leaked, Lola is a fun character just for this song.”
While scrapped songs and visuals are nothing new in the music industry (hello, Gaga’s “Do What U Want” video, thank you for never fully seeing the light of day), it’s entirely unheard of for a leaked buzz track to be accompanied by a viral promotional campaign. A website (the now-defunct whoislola.com), a Twitter account (which was hacked into and revived to its former glory, including the original bio “who am i? well, wouldn’t you like to know”), and a MySpace account were all set up for Lola, going public on the day of the song’s “leak.” It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots: Epic poured money into Lola hoping it would drum up even half the hype of Sasha Fierce – if it worked, they’d move forward with the Lola persona and video teases, if not, they’d say the record was leaked, shelve the video, take the loss, and shuffle forward with a new plan.
A month later, Lopez was readying the debut performance of “Louboutins,” the song set to replace “Fresh Out The Oven” as the first single for Love? But in the days leading up to Lopez’s performance at the 2009 American Music Awards, Lopez and the team at Epic received a surprise: Lola was charting.
“The Wig Made You Look Really Bad”
The Billboard Hot Dance Club Songs chart is one aggregate that is unlike any of the publication’s other charts, it’s based on a national survey of club DJs and to determine the songs that they’re playing most across the country. One could argue that, because it’s not based on direct sales figures, success on the Dance Club chart shouldn’t be revered as a major achievement. But songs that do well on the Dance Club chart often prove to be indicators of what might become major on the Hot 100, signaling labels to push certain songs harder than others.
With the news that “Fresh Out The Oven” had popped up on the Dance Club charts, Epic decided to give the song one final push alongside “Louboutins.” In an archived post from her website on November 20, 2009 titled “Video Premiere Today, All New Website, and AMA Performance this Sunday,” a webmaster at Epic wrote that “the video for the J-Lo club smash ‘Fresh Out The Oven’ starring Jennifer Lopez as Lola and featuring Pitbull premieres TODAY!” Hours later, a low-quality video premiered on her site. The visual has since been scrubbed from Lopez’s official YouTube account, but lives on forever, unmoored by the hands of Epic Records.
The video was directed by Jonas Åkerlund, who was fresh off his work with Lady Gaga on the acclaimed “Paparazzi” video. But Lola was no Gaga. The video for “Fresh Out The Oven” is a mess of repeated sequences that looks like it was cobbled together from leftover scraps of footage handed over after Epic Records couldn’t afford to pay Åkerlund and his team to finish the video’s concept (which, by the way, is purely my speculation and cannot be verified at this time).
Back when he was interviewed at the VMAs in September of that year, Pitbull described the concept as something “very, very sexy, sort of like Eyes Wide Shut.” I’m not sure Mr. Worldwide/305 has ever actually seen Stanley Kubrick’s final film because the video doesn’t have much in common with the movie at all, other than that both leave you initially dumbfounded after they’re over.
Fans had mixed reactions to the video. Little Jenny From The Blockheads sounded off in the comments section of her website about Lola, the song, and the choppy bangs she sports in the video:
“congratulations on this new job”
“love the video, love u!!!!
sorrey but i dont like the wig at all”
“verry verry good & sexy - Eye-wink”
“not the best song sounds like somthing from the 90's and the wig made you look really bad. hope the next song is better. still a fan”
“WHERE DID YOU GET THE WIG FROM? TINA TURNER.....”
Still, ten weeks after its debut, the song managed to claim the top spot on the Dance Club chart, with “Louboutins” following soon after. However, both songs were ultimately scrapped from Love? after they failed to make an impression on the Billboard Hot 100.
In February 2010, Lopez parted from Epic Records and Sony as a whole after all parties had agreed that Lopez had fulfilled her contractual obligations up to that point. Love? was temporarily shelved until Lopez signed with Island Def Jam and picked up recording, bringing over a select few songs from the record’s sessions at Epic but leaving “Louboutins” and “Fresh Out The Oven” in the decade prior.
One year later, in November 2010, Amanda Ghost was fired from Epic Records after only twenty months at the helm. The label was failing to generate any major successes and Ghost’s management style had only become more unruly, with several reports surfacing that Ghost was regularly smoking pot in her office and questioning the ability of employees who weren’t lighting up on the job. The final straw came after Ghost stormed the stage when Augustana, who were signed to Epic, had a minor technical difficulty during a live performance. According to a source, Ghost screamed, “Who booked this fucking place? It sounds like shit! We don't treat our artists this way at Epic. I'm not letting them play another minute!’.”
Epi-Lola-logue
More than ten years later, Lola remains in the past, a forgotten blip in the long and storied career of Jennifer Lopez. The alter ego hasn’t been mentioned since “Fresh Out The Oven” made its final Dance Club chart impact, but I think of it often. It was such a strange moment in pop music history, an attempt at creating intrigue around an artist whose music has never lent itself to any kind of mystery. But, in some ways, “Fresh Out The Oven” is a major success story, not only did it chart but it connected Lopez with her now frequent collaborator and friend Pitbull, leading to the massive success of Love?’s actual first single, “On The Floor,” one of Lopez’s biggest songs to date.
Truthfully, Lopez may not be the star she is today without Lola. Sure, there’s no doubt she’d still be incredibly successful as an actress and an entrepreneur, but without her two-second stint giving us straight sugar lovin’ fresh out the oven, I’m not sure J.Lo would’ve continued her music career at all. And without that, we wouldn’t have “Papi”! We wouldn’t have “Tens”! We wouldn’t have “LET’S GET LOOOOOOOUUUUUUD!”
The artist formerly known as Lola gave us more than the world was ready for in 2009. If you have, at any point, enjoyed even one second of a Jennifer Lopez/Pitbull collaboration, you owe it all to Lola.
She may not have reinvented sexy, but she helped reinvent J.Lo.