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

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

i have a theory that every super popular artist has a "New Jersey" - like Bon Jovi's album New Jersey -- where it's still super popular and even more popular than the albums that preceded it but there's some sense that the gig is up.

― Elrond Hubbard (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, August 7, 2012

that's why Weezer doesn't fit.

Yeah, I mean, we can have another thread for middling mediocre-performing albums by big-ish artists, mobilized by one hit but gaining no place in anybody's hearts, but it's kinda not as interesting as looking around and realizing that something truly massive and ubiquitous-feeling, the latest missive from a juggernaut, has quietly become an obscurity. There really aren't that many New Jerseys, "every huge artist" notwithstanding.

Every artist has a moment to audition for a New Jersey on this thread.

it's true i'm an uptight crybaby about this stuff but every time it gets revived i'm legit excited someone found an artist we forgot in our thorough search nigh ought two years ago, and instead it's always someone who doesn't know how to count to 3x platinum

woof pretend i said "just over" instead of "nigh ought" i'm this far from an "au contraire, mon frere!" apparently

not "every huge artist" has an NJ moment, though.

Lol I feel like "Beverly Hills" fills the role of millenial-analogue to "Bad Medicine" really well, so much so that I'm tempted to poll the two songs.

yeah, I had to play "Beverly Hills" on Spotify just now because I had no idea what song you guys were talking about, and I guess it sounds sort of familiar.

the question is does the above post discredit or reinforce make believe's already-power-vetoed consideration for NJ status // subtext being i don't think anyone here can even agree on the criteria

I'm personally not sold on it as 'event' - 'rock album that did pretty well for the period, above average for the band' sure, but I don't remember it being a 'thing' at the time.

Weezer's New Jersey had to have happened by the late 90s

Criteria IMO

1. A big deal album (at least 3x platinum, possible Rivers On MySpace exceptions for the last ten years) that did as well as or better than the last album, which was also a big deal album.
2. The next album was, if not a straight out flop, undeniable evidence the act had been knocked down a tier.
3. In hindsight, the success of the the album in question was puffed up by previous triumphs.

So whether you want to say make believe was an event album for 2005 standards, there's no way to argue maladroit was a slippery when wet. Make believe's success came from an exceptionally big hit on it.

It'd almost be like saying chuck berry's New Jersey was the album with "my ding-a-ling" on it

Maladroit for some reason seemed to come really hard on the green album's heels. Like it seemed like as soon as I digested Hash Pipe there was already a video for Gone Fishin (which I barely saw) (I barely hear that song tbh) and a whole nother album to go with it.

Tbf I'm not sure whether to chalk that up to the peculiarity of my experience or the fundamental erraticness of Weezer's career

Whoops BIG Amendment to criteria 1 - on phone, sorry - the New Jersey does NOT have to do as well as the slippery when wet. It just has to do considerably well, on a level well above the keep the faith

or as mr raffles said in the initial reposting

To be a New Jersey:
- follow-up to a huge, (possibly) defining record
- has less and/or smaller hits than prev album - or - hits based more on momentum than appeal
- brings with it the feeling that the NEXT record (if there is one) will see the bottom fall out (relatively speaking)

with the multi-platinum bar added to keep solipsistic indie fucks from talking about whichever pavement or death cab album all their friends bought but now no one talks about, and those feelings about then next dropping replaced with the knowledge so prognosticators have to sit on their hands

keep the faith was huge in the UK though. They actually started playing stadiums here at that time and still do.

the almighty wikipedia says slippery when wet is 3x platinum in the uk, new jersey 2x platinum and keep the faith 1x platinum. it does seem their singles game was strong over there though

they probably got a lot more airplay with keep the faith but those 2 albums were huge at school but keep the faith kept them in the big league here with huge singles.

totally endorse the brits starting an "EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW" thread