Every huge artist has their "New Jersey" - a huge event album that ultimately feels a bit hollow & signals a career decline

That Jovi's going with this claim only make me angrier that Def Leppard's "Rocket" only got to #12.

I hope Bon Jovi got real pedantic and used this logic to make this argument with someone.

an album that could have achieved this if the label had given a fuck about the honor re: single formatting - Jagged Little Pill

("Ironic," "You Oughta Know" and "You Learn" all went Top 10, "Hand In My Pocket" and "Head Over Feet" did well enough on related charts to suggest it was a technicality they didn't make the big one)

tico torres was on some bullshit like "max played with a jazz grip on that album, it barely even counts as rock"

― some dude, Wednesday, June 25, 2014 12:23 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hahahahahaha

didn't the alanis record predate the whole dropping of the physical-single requirement for the hot 100

Maybe they're sneaking by on the fact that Born in the USA had 7 top 10 hits. That's not 5! It's 7! Only New Jersey had 5.

― intheblanks, Wednesday, 25 June 2014 12:22 (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hope Bon Jovi got real pedantic and used this logic to make this argument with someone.

― intheblanks, Wednesday, 25 June 2014 12:24 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lol, well, if we're being pedantic, Born in the USA did have five top 10 hits; it just had an additional two. Someone could conceivably debate whether it really counts as a rock album (given that e.g. Thriller obv doesn't count) but I don't know if Bon Jovi is that someone.

yup, re alanis. "hand" and "head" went to #4 and #1 respectively on the "mainstream Top 40" chart

but man, even if we accept the technicality, bon forgetting about bruce is hysterical

I could see someone associated with the Jovi organization, or JovCorp, arguing that BITUSA doesn't count because there's no loud guitars on "Dancing in the Dark" or "My Hometown."

apparently huey lewis and the news' album "fore!" also had five top 10s. as did "invisible touch" by genesis. in fact the latter had five top 5 hits.

yeah but those guys aren't REAL rock and roll, they've got a lot of synths and...oh wait

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pv9JXDdJSQI/TwEk6ocfR2I/AAAAAAAAAXc/nk2D_vkplNM/s1600/Bon%252BJovi%252BPerforms%252BNBC%252Bs%252BToday%252BG2YcCVM9mW-l.jpg

Pretty clear that they didn't actually fact check this assertion at all. I hope it's just something that's been accepted as true in the Bon Jovi camp for the past 25 years.

whoever came up with that claim was totally trolling people in this thread

i mean way to make your huge event album feel a bit hollow, bon jovi

Some think the verses have an eerily and uncredited similarity (both musically and melodically) to John Lennon's Beatles' track "Don't Let Me Down" (recorded during the Get Back sessions) and the chorus was claimed, by some fans of the late 1980s hard rock genre, to have been culled from an unreleased song by Joel Ellis of Cats in Boots and Heavy Bones.[2][3] Ellis has said that Lehua Reid (Richie Sambora's ex-fiancée) regaled him with anecdotes regarding Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora "sitting at the piano for hours with a box full of tapes they got from people and going through the songs looking for stuff they could rip off and laughing about it, your [Ellis'] song was played over and over and over."[3]

haha hard working plagiarists, sitting at a piano for hours trying not to create anything original

then laughing about it

lolling at this entire discussion

Here is the full list of top ten singles from one album:

7
Michael Jackson / Thriller
Bruce Springsteen / Born in the U.S.A.
Janet Jackson / Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814
Michael Jackson / Bad

6
George Michael / Faith
Janet Jackson / Janet
Katy Perry / Teenage Dream

5
Paula Abdul / Forever Your Girl
Milli Vanilli / Girl You Know It's True
Madonna / True Blue
Fergie / The Dutchess
Genesis / Invisible Touch
Whitney Houston / Whitney
Janet Jackson / Control
New Kids on the Block / Hangin' Tough
Lionel Richie / Can't Slow Down
Black Eyed Peas / The END
Huey Lewis & the News / Fore!
Bon Jovi / New Jersey
Bobby Brown / Don't Be Cruel

dots and loops - stereolab

1989

yes, sadly

*walks in*

*walks out, slams door*

absolutely 1989. completely irredeemable record ("shake it off" is okay, but not redemptively okay).

weezer don't have a career trajectory that quite fits the model but Make Believe is otherwise a clear NJ. all-time biggest commercial/mainstream resonance for them, but one of those CDs that infested used sections a few months after release. marked an irreversible drop-off for them both commercially and critically, too (per p4k's pans people tend to forget it but green and maladroit were actually quite well received upon release).

green album was huge when I was in hs

While it was a comeback from Maladroit, Make Believe sold less than the green album and less than half what the blue album, so "all-time biggest commercial/mainstream resonance" seems pretty debatable. Weezer was gold-level rock act that could go platinum with a hit single, and Make Believe was the last time they had one.

So ok in this revive we've got "album from indie act that was laughably nowhere near event status," "extremely popular new album some posters think is poopie and pray is the beginning of the end but can't wait to find out" and "album where someone clearly didn't check the sales figures before making their claims" i forget is there any other offering to NJ-hood that makes me pedantic and huffy we haven't seen yet?

a good metaphor would be that part of a roadrunner cartoon where wile e coyote has run off the cliff and hasn't realized it yet, so by definition it can't be a commercial comeback album. make believe may have felt a bit hollow to critics and to you and me but it's not like "dope nose" and "keep fishin" have proven more enduring than "beverly hills" and "perfect situation".

yeah I see no sign that in 2018 we'll look at 1989 and think, "Wow, here's when we knew the next album was going to be Keep the Faith."

and as for people who want to say taylor has clearly run off the cliff she already has an answer for you, and it's been in the top ten for going on 20 weeks now, at least let her release her Keep The Faith before you bury her

xpost!

admittedly people are looking right about Born This Way but imo announcing new jerseys is far sweeter in hindsight

"lol wait THAT song made the top ten? i completely forget how that goes!" vs "oooh i hate that song in the top ten someday the world will realize i am right"

i don't hate 1989 or anything!

new jerseys aren't even necessarily bad imo

listen call me old fashioned but when i call a new jersey i listen to my gut, and my gut's telling me the whole brouhaha regarding 1989 feels new jerseyish, you pencil pushers with your advanced sabremetrics might tell me otherwise but i'll stand by it

oh it couuuuld be a new jersey fer sure, i just don't count my chickens before they hatch

also i don't see any reason "shake it off" and "blank space" will be less enduring culturally than "we are never getting back together" and "i knew you were trouble"

where as you compare bon jovi's #7 hit "wanted dead or alive" and bon jovi's #7 hit "lay your hands on me"...

On the latest Billboard 200 albums chart, Taylor Swift's 1989 collected an eighth nonconsecutive week atop the list, moving 244,000 equivalent units in the week ending Jan. 4, according to Nielsen Music (That figure was comprised of 172,000 in pure album sales, with the rest made up of track equivalent albums and streaming equivalent albums.)

croup otm

Bad Medicine is still p well known

"While it was a comeback from Maladroit, Make Believe sold less than the green album and less than half what the blue album, so "all-time biggest commercial/mainstream resonance" seems pretty debatable. Weezer was gold-level rock act that could go platinum with a hit single, and Make Believe was the last time they had one."

funny you say that. rivers cuomo posted (on his myspace, straight '05) those sales figures after having read that in 2005 you could multiply an album's sales figures by three to get a sense of what its decade-ago marketplace parity would be. and, he was very happy to say, by that logic Make Believe would be their biggest seller. i'm not sure precisely how fair that calculation was (i don't remember his source, but knowing him it would have been a billboard article or something similarly "definitive"), but to say a 2005 album wasn't as big as a 1994 album due to a sales delta is facile. moreover, i'm pretty sure Make Believe sold more in a year than Blue did, it's just that Blue has gone on to become a rock classic and has had many many years to rake in those additional two platinum plaques.

anyway: "buddy holly" was big, thanks to microsoft, but "beverly hills" was on a completely different level. it was a genuine anthem for a mainstream market of people who'd never heard of weezer before and never would again. and to further the NJ argument, there is no doubt that MB rang hollow to depths previously unplumbed by the band. emo kids and p4k reacted vehemently to Green, but that was more their Wild Honey than their 15 Big Ones.

yeah by "debatable" i meant there's both sides to the debate, so I'm not saying Make Believe WASN'T a big commercial moment for them, just that it's not some hands-down thing - also i would not credit microsoft alone for the success of "buddy holly"

but again, make believe was a comeback album after a modest one, not the fanfared-but-hollow followup to their biggest smashes

also new jersey's seeming hollow is supposed to happen in hindsight, an immediate press backlash to a new album is kinda neither here nor there

Weezer is an odd case overall, they feel like they kind of had three distinct career (alt rock sensations/indie cult act/slightly cooler OK Go)

yeah & isn't the "feeling hollow" partly a commercial thing, like that its huge sales don't result in the songs having any legs? not just that some critics or whatever say "yeah I don't feel this one as much".

xp

the fact that we're hinging anything on the opinion of "emo kids and p4k" suggests "event album" in the sense of new jersey doesn't apply

not that this will stop someone from reviving this thread with THE SUBURBS in six months

Reflektor is a better choice for Arcade Fire anyways.

Also while rivers on MySpace might be right about "marketplace parity" in the sense that make believe was a bigger deal among 2005 albums than the blue album was among 1994 albums, saying that makes make believe a bigger deal than the blue album is only true if you believe new music in every year stays equally culturally noteworthy irrespective of marketplace shrink. By rivers on MySpace logic, American idiot is a far bigger deal than Dookie, etc

Also if "Beverly hills" was in a whole other unprecedented level for the band, it clearly wasn't their "born to be my baby"

I just looked it up on wiki and American Idiot sold 15M worldwide! (Dookie did 20 but still)

man y'all are making this a straw man party. "beverly hills" was the second biggest song of '05. the record went platinum. it was everywhere in used record stores a number of months later. that's the pertinent 'hindsight hollowness.' the mention of "emo kids and p4k" was in reference to the Green album, and was pretty clearly a tangential point (and we've already established upthread that critical backlash at the time is irrelevant).

i'll agree that weezer have a weird career and don't /totally/ fit the model but sweet christ calm down