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

does it really count as a part of the album though. it's tacked on at the end & existed for a full year prior right

yea it def doesn't. it's a bonus track. views is definitely his new jersey

Probably can add Life of Pablo to this

^what i was thinking

idk i think a lot of people are stanning for Pablo as AOTY

MBDTF was already kanye's new jersey, notwithstanding the brief uptick that was the first half of yeezus

except that like everyone under the age of 22 thinks MBDTF is one of the greatest albums of all time (wtf right??)

one problem (of many) with the "every huge artist has a New Jersey" theory is that some artists are taken more seriously after their commercial peak than Bon fucking Jovi

I don't trust myself on predicting Drake decline anymore, figured NWTS was gonna be the cultural high-water mark

idk i think a lot of people are stanning for Pablo as AOTY

― flappy bird, Friday, May 13, 2016 2:53 PM

he's like Elvis Costello in the '80s: lots of people will think a new album is his latest masterpiece.

And even New Jersey did not immediately present itself as a New Jersey.

kanye breaks the mold but drake i think fits very comfortably into it, like lady gaga

yeah called it for views from the 6, I would argue that for Kanye it was Twisted Fantasy

While it's true that for people less than 25 years old MBDTF is the preferred album, they don't care about singles.

Does anyone else recall the excellent thread in which we sought various bands' equivalent of Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie? That was a high quality thread.

Geez, it seems (upon searching in earnest) that that was this very thread. Sorry, carry on.

wait, what was drake's peak? i could never make it through an entire album.

Just searched the thread to see if this had come up:

Here's one: Nelly - Sweat/Suit

― The Reverend, Thursday, August 16, 2012 6:46 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Lmao some dude sorry my theory doesn't stand up to rigorous scientific analysis

Here's one that doesn't seem to have been mentioned: Stone Temple Pilots' "Purple." It's 6x platinum, and had several hit singles ("Big Empty," "Interstate Love Song," "Vasoline"), but all of the songs most people remember are on "Core" (8x platinum). And then "Tiny Music" was only 2x platinum.

Those STP songs from Purple are still pretty well-remembered.

more likely to hear those songs on the radio than "wicked garden" at this point imo

Ha, OK, maybe *I* just don't remember them as well!

yeah those songs got/get massive airplay

Interstate is probably their most beloved song

yeah Interstate is in some football commercial/bumper. their New Jersey is def Tiny Music.

not sure Tiny Music qualifies as an "event," though. they just had a series of reasonably-performing albums with diminishing returns from their big breakthrough.

Only Around the World in a Day is mentioned upthread vis à vis Prince, but surely Batman is his real New Jersey

no way, diamonds and pearls went double platinum and two top-five hits

also i don't think prince had a new jersey, obviously he had a decline, but i can't pinpoint one record that replicated the commercial success of the previous one by hollowly serving up more of the same.

On the grander scale of things, Love Symbol is his New Jersey - but only if you take the singles.

I think a lot of people (including me) would argue that the album tracks on LS are better than D&P, but IMO D&P's hits are more memorable. D&P was a commercial comeback in itself.

Prince was never really the BIG DEAL that he was after 1992/93 (for obviously different reasons). You could argue that there were mini-New Jerseys before (and maybe after).

Around the World in a Day to me is a classic daring "follow up a massive hit with something that doesn't sound anything like it" album, not at all a New Jersey. More like a Tusk, only not as good.

yeah agreed, the 60s psychedelia (as portrayed on the cover and the raspberry beret video) was very purposefully out of step with what was going on in pop and his previous image

xposts to scott: take care is drake's good album

just spent 90 minutes re-reading this thread (for the 3rd time, no less) rather than doing work I should be doing.

every time I discover something new to love here.

tonight it was: JovCorp

Lmao some dude sorry my theory doesn't stand up to rigorous scientific analysis

― rockpalast '82 (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, May 13, 2016 8:05 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my beef is not w/ the theory itself to be clear, you gave the board a beautiful dangerous gift with this idea

i should quantum leap to stop myself

1989 thread:
this will turn out to have been her New Jersey, right?

― Swag Heathen (theStalePrince), Thursday, July 14, 2016 5:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Are there New Jerseys where the career decline that follows has more to do with fame and trappings than outright talent/popularity of the music itself?

god there are so many wrong answers in this thing

Just heard new Bon Jovi on top forty. Apparently the album is his quid-ag soul-searcher:

Lyrics on the album talk about difficulties Jon came across over 2014-2015. Jon explained: "A lot happened. Richie's sudden departure, my trying to buy the (Buffalo) Bills and now this with the label. I have a lot of material to write about. Believe me, the new record is good. It's pointed. It is something we are going to be very proud of in the spring when we put it out."(5)

Once upon a time not so long ago, Tommy used to work on the docks...

And I hear I thought someone was prematurely going to call Blonde a New Jersey.

Sorry if this was covered above, but is the era of New Jerseys over? Was it sort of dependent on the culture of months-long hype followed by lines at record stores on release day?

My contention has always been that they fall between Thriller and Napster:

also, i wonder this gets a bit at raffles's question of why this seems like a late 80s/early 90s thing - - - I think to have a New Jersey you have to be in that post-Thriller, pre-download age when marketing was album-oriented and there was a general tendency to milk singles out of a record for a long while, so that you could rack up these like 5-6 single runs from albums that ultimately people didn't care that much about, and meanwhile even as the album's life cycle was playing out, the band's position in pop's hierarchy was slipping, or radio formats were shifting out from under them, not completely but enough that the album never built up a longer-term base.

For a long time, I've felt like the New Jersey was basically a historical phenomenon that couldn't happen again (...) an album every 2-3 years, heavy with potential singles that you try to milk for almost all of that period, keeping excitement up for tour dates etc. A lot of the biggest artists now have stuff coming out so continuously (singles and featured credits), which adds to the post-CD sense that the dropping of the "album" isn't really so much of an event. On the other hand, something like Teenage Dream (single releases from May 2010 to October 2011) (not counting the reissue) suggests that really extended marketing around a record isn't entirely dead, it just may be down to a very few top-drawer hitmakers. If I could be convinced that Prism felt like an event (or if people even noticed that there was a new album and not just some more new Katy Perry stuff on the radio, like there always is), then it would at least be possible to someday look back on it and recognize a New Jersey, allowing for some River Of MySpace math. Though it was Gaga who led us down this path in the first place, I doubt this will ever seem quite apt for Born This Way.

One thing I'd add to that might be the centrality of MTV in that same era, and its capacity to add tremendous aura to a band and its releases without any of it being siphoned off, diluted or undermined by the endless day-to-day update cycle of the Internet. Building up to, promoting, and delivering an "event" release surely made more sense under those conditions.

sound analysis. Yeah I think there are a lot of factors making it hard to create that kind of event release in this market, including the lack of record stores for people to line up at, a more diffuse musical audience by taste/style, lower overall record sales, extensive leaking, the ability to legally stream brand new albums etc. Of course I'm a few years from 40 and no longer in the demographic that would get really excited about such things, whereas I remember as a kid the event of Use Your Illusions I/II just loomed monumental even though I wasn't even the biggest GnR fan. It was more the fact that I hung out at Arnold's Disc Shop a lot, my friends were talking about it, I had only recently gotten MTV, I was pushing puberty, etc.

So I basically have no idea how teenagers are relating to new releases.

Carl Wilson in a Frank O. essay:

Drake’s long-anticipated Views dispensed a fistful of hits, but in its sprawl and bagginess the whole fell flat as the career-topping statement that had been expected.

i remember distinctly driving 1 hour to a musicland that was in another town to buy Use Your Illusion I & II on a midnight sale but in the car we were listening to nothing's shocking by jane's addiction cassette, the times were changin

the thing about new jerseys is often they're really bombastic and over the top, too. like in terms of sheer in-your-faceness. i'm thinking about 'bad medicine', 'let's get rocked', 'november rain', etc. and people get psyched about the size of that damn thing and what's missing out of all of those songs imo and a lot of similar kickoff singles from similar albums is the quality control.

that's probably been stated before in this thread.

Peter Gabriel's Us, maybe? Event album, reached similar chart positions as beloved predecessor So, included two hit singles including "Steam" which seemed an obvious knockoff of "Sledgehammer". But when did you last hear anything from Us? Probably not since something from the first four albums which were all lesser hits, and certainly not since the last few times you heard "In Your Eyes" from So.

I still think Bad is more of a New Jersey than Dangerous. With hindsight it's a pretty major fall-off songwise, though it's still a good record, and every one of his albums from then on sold less than the one before it no matter what kind of bullshit sales figures CBS tried to hype to the global news media. True, Dangerous was a worldwide smash and a much better record than Bad - which, again, it didn't outsell. But I feel like by that point, two years before the first sex abuse allegations, the writing was already pretty firmly on the wall that he would never top Thriller.