In the need to try to please everyone, the hip-hop influenced tracks at the top are balanced by the wannabe adult contemporary staples at the end, including another oddly titled ditty, “How to Touch a Girl” - with lyrics so generic you’ve probably already written them. To top it off, when Warren feeds JoJo an awkward line like “If you could see the one I see when I see you / You’d know how lucky you are to be you” from the rather unexceptional “Exceptional,” you’re reduced more to cringing than agreeing. Unfortunately, that song is just bland (shock and surprise). At times her blend of pop schmaltz is fine (Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” remains a guilty pleasure to this day), and even the idea of gospel-tinged closer (“Note to God”) would play to JoJo’s gospel-singing upbringing. Possibly even trumping that track are the pitiful Dianne Warren ballads brought in at the end. Immediately following the bland Storch opener, Swizz Beatz shames his own name with the awkwardly titled “The Way You Do Me” - a club track that would have been hot at roughly never any point in history.
What’s particularly sad is how all the big names that are brought in happen to deliver some of their worst work. As repackaged as it is, it actually has something that the rest of the album is sorely lacking: personality. It’s something that Alanis Morrissette might have recorded for her last I’m-no-longer-angry-and-therefore-am-content-with-plain-ballads album. Certainly, the lead single “Too Little Too Late” is appropriately melodramatic, covering the exact same ground that “Leave (Get Out)” covered but without the angry chorus (if it ain’t broke …). From the most generic cover in the world to one of the most shockingly low-energy opening tracks in recent memory (the Storch-produced “This Time”), there really isn’t much to recommend.
It’s really shocking how bland this album is. We’re back to the days of a really good single and an unholy amount of filler. Could she actually release a true-to-life good album? Would The High Road be the next Bodyguard Soundtrack, or even Breakaway for that matter? They were actual songs, not just a litany of beats arranged around JoJo’s quite-good voice. Yet even filler like “The Happy Song” was actually enjoyable, catchy, and sort of fun. The tell-off lead single “Leave (Get Out)” was quite good, even if it was a little bit odd that you were receiving relationship advice from a 13-year-old girl. On her 2004 self-titled debut, she had upstart producers like Soulshock giver her beats that were, surprisingly, good. So it’s no surprise that the cover sticker of 15-year-old diva JoJo’s sophomore effort proudly trumpets the presence of noted rap producers Swizz Beatz and Top 40 go-to-guy Scott Storch. It’s like pop music in the ’80s all over again, only now the charts aren’t controlled by artists, but by songwriters and - more than ever - producers.
I’ve steered people towards greatness and away from crap several times, but shortly after “Since U Been Gone” nearly re-defined pop music in a rock context in 2004, pop albums, on the whole, have been actually getting better. Having worked in music retail for several years, I’ve come across multiple people - even during the advent of iTunes - that simply didn’t want to buy an album because of the fear that the one song they heard on the radio was good, and the rest would be terrible.
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