Review Summary: Not to be confused with an apparent singing and dancing television icon "JoJo Siwa", who rather annoyingly kept popping up as I was researching for this review.
In August 2021, the hashtag #Aaliyahiscoming began trending on social media. Blackground Records, which was the disbanded record company that held the rights to two of the late R&B singer's three albums, had rebranded into Blackground Records 2.0. The company announced that they would be adding Aaliyah's missing music to streaming platforms in the coming weeks, in the wake of the majority of her music being missing from these platforms for several years. I was ecstatic, as I had been waiting for a long time to delve into Aaliyah's music via my preferred music app Spotify. I proceeded to visit the new Blackground Records 2.0 website, which many of the emerging news article reporting on the story were directing me to, and it was there that I discovered something that interested me greatly.
This Blackground Records that took Aaliyah's albums down with the ship before resurfacing had apparently also taken the young JoJo's first two albums with them. These albums, her self-titled and
The High Road, had also been missing from streaming platforms for a long time, which prompted a grown-up JoJo to re-record them in their entirety in 2018. The rebirth of Blackground Records is not something that could have been predicted, and JoJo most likely believed that the original versions of her songs would never become available again to stream. Blackground Records set the date of September 24th 2021 for JoJo's albums to be re-added, and surely enough (I had been anxiously refreshing Spotify at midnight of that day), there the albums were, sitting there in the discography list humbly, with no grand prior announcement like what was made with Aaliyah's music.
I had been listening to JoJo's 2018 version of her self-titled album consistently since it dropped (I absolutely adore that one), but it had been several years since I listened to the original, due to its inaccessibility. I gave it a spin, and although I was flooded with familiarity due to having many listens of the re-recording, I could not shake the blatant truth of it, that JoJo had completely outclassed these originals in 2018 in nearly every regard. Although JoJo was a terrific singer at thirteen, the later versions showed much more confident and refined performances, as well as the absence of an albeit adorable lisp which was evident in her younger days. The beats and instrumentals had also been transformed from the bygone sterile early-2000's radio-pop style to fuller and more bass-heavy iterations of their former selves.
There is not one song on JoJo's self-titled album that I don't prefer the 2018 version of, and I am unfortunately not able to give a more objective, and non-comparative review of the original. I do, however, enjoy this 2004 version, as it still contains the spark that was able to ignite the later version. For those of you who are wholly unfamiliar with JoJo's music, you have at least heard
Leave (Get Out) on the radio a couple hundred times, as it has cemented itself as an eternal 2000's pop-classic. This album contains fourteen songs, fifty-two minutes of music in a similar vein; ruminations of a teenage girl about young love and other hardships, sung over intuitive pop-R&B beats.
While I highly recommend
JoJo (2018) to anyone who enjoys pop music, I also inherently recommend
JoJo (2004) as a necessary listen before diving into the later version. Out of curiosity, I checked JoJo's Twitter feed a few days after this album made its way back to streaming platforms, and I was surprised but also not surprised to see that she had made absolutely no mention of it. JoJo is currently in the midst of promoting her new music, and she likely didn't want to shed light on what is already done and over with in her career, especially as it pertains to record label which she reportedly had a falling out with. But regardless of what may have went down between Jojo and Blackground Records, I'm grateful that the record company was able to pull themselves up from the ashes to redistribute their old classics.
