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

i am the new jersey to da croupier's slippery

whiney is dom's NJ imo

culture ii does not feel like a nj to me

really ?
To me it's like an obvious NJ case !

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

But of course, as we've seen many times in this thread, this is not rocket science !

Lovesexy is Prince's surely. The Graffiti Bridge film didn't even get a Uk cinema release that's how bad things had got by then.

Yeah but then Batman, D&P and Love Symbol were big.
Love Symbol has his last mainstream hits.

So regarding the thread title, not EVERY huge artist has a NJ !

Lovesexy definitely his NJ
D&P and Symbol had some hits and sold but none of them really felt like zeitgeisty events (same way Bon Jovi had hits or at least one after NJ)

Yeah but regarding the NJ conditions, after Lovesexy there's Batman which was HUGE and then D&P which was his 2nd biggest album sales
I don't hink a NJ can be followed by some of the most successful albums of an artist...

also, Lovesexy followed Sign which wasn't more successful than the previous albums, so again, not a NJ condition.

@dyl

How do you figure CII isn't a New Jersey?

Batman and other albums may have been hits, but there was definitely the feeling that Prince's imperial period was over after Lovesexy

(same way Bon Jovi had hits or at least one after NJ)

Eight top 40 hits on Billboard post-New Jersey
Ten top 10 albums, not counting compilations, including four at #1

Batman and other albums may have been hits, but there was definitely the feeling that Prince's imperial period was over after Lovesexy

I totally agree but then it's only one of the conditions for a NJ. That's why I don't think it qualifies.

lotta king jersey only going on in this thread

Prince probably doesn't have a New Jersey.

I feel like if he did it would have to be Around the World in a Day

the Batman soundtrack was huge, but honestly I think that was part of the whole crazy pop culture phenomenon around that movie

yeah but tbf prince being selected to be part of that circus suggests he was still a huge event level artist. he doesn't have one imo.

re: CII, trying to evaluate an album just released this year is a fool's game. this thread was prompted by consideration of Born This Way during the leadup to ARTPOP but BTW's NJ-ness wasn't really verifiable until at least the release of Joanne and maybe later.

Wu Tang 'The W' (or maybe already 'Wu Tang Forever'?)

Yeah, Forever imo.
It was their biggest seller following the breakthrough but it all went downward quickly after that.

oooooh, Wu-Tang Forever might just be a candidate. fits at least the general outline - massive massive event that in hindsight feels more like a victory lap as they never really attained anywhere close to those heights again. the most successful later outings had at most one single that really made an impact (e.g. "got your money"). i wasn't listening to rap radio or BET super regularly in the late 90s/early 00s but i have the vague sense that the genre was going through shifts comparable to rock radio in the late 90s/early 00s, that may have left acts like the wu a little out of step? one of those "the genre/audience changed out from under them" scenarios, common to many NJ's. also the numbers are there - iirc, up to that point, killa beez had sold fifty gold, sixty platinum.

I posited shortly after he died that Batman itself was Prince's NJ, because it did "ultimately feel hollow" and the hits from it felt compromised even at the time. Graffiti Bridge confirmed those pessimistic expectations, and his subsequent smattering of '90s hits felt like a different, off-peak phase of his career.

If it's not Batman though, I'm fine with the idea of Prince not having a NJ.

Yeah actually it kinda works with Batman. Except Batman didn't surf on the momentum of the previous album's success...

But I guess the final consensus is that Prince doesn't have one.

Forever always seemed odd, as it was undeniably huge at the time but felt almost anti-commercial

looking at Prince certifications. It's so up and down--surprised that Lovesexy only went Gold and the two preceding albums were 1X Platinum

Batman went 2X Platinum, then Graffitti Bridge Gold, then D&P 2X Platinum

Wu-Tang Forever is actually fucking amazing, so many great songs on that

About the NPG/D&P and Symbol years, I remember that he was still huge on tv/radio.
then he disappeared almost overnight !

Yeah, the problem with Forever is that it's actually a GREAT album (although too long).

there's def some kind of limit condition where when an artist is too huge for too long, it's less and less likely that they'll have an NJ and that if they do it's more contested. because they've just accumulated too many fans, maybe even too many *demographics* of fans, that they can't really shed them fast enough for the post-NJ slide to happen. by 1989 prince had been adding new fans for most of a decade across idk eight or nine albums of which at least five or six were "huge events." that just isn't going to dissipate all at once even if you're actively TRYING to kill it, let alone reaching for new cross-promotional heights with the biggest blockbuster of the summer. see the earlier comments about the stones/jay-z "every album will be an event til they die" phenomenon. this may also be why we keep coming back to relitigate bad vs. dangerous.

But whenever you hear some Wu Tang nowadays (radio, movies...), it's 100% Enter.
Forever (and the following albums) didn't leave a mark in the culture (except for the fans, obviously).

One could argue that Batman was really a follow up to Sign O the Times and its accompanying concert film, since right after that came the confusion over the Black Album being advertised as his next album, then suddenly withdrawn, then Lovesexy appears as a single unsequenced track making it seem like an oddity (though I still think the quality of Lovesexy places it in his imperial phase).

agreed abt forever being anti-commercial - not a lot of "singles" there in terms of reasonable length, recurring hooks, etc. whereas most of the predecessor wu records had at least two or three obvious singles i think. and yet it sold crazily because they were obviously the hugest thing going and getting them back together on a double album was inevitably super anticipated. they'd planned it that way. "triumph" indeed. then when The W had more obvious single material, it sort of worked but also felt much more like an ordinary album and not an event, their status had deflated in the intervening years.

One could argue that Batman was really a follow up to Sign O the Times and its accompanying concert film,

Except the film was poorly distributed and promoted, and barely played a week in the few towns where you could see it. Even if you were a huge Prince fan at the time, you would've missed the film...or missed hearing about the film at all.

xp

It was a big hit at my college but I guess I was living in kind of a bubble at the time

The chief cultural legacy of Wu-Tang Forever is the Triumph music video. Almost everything else seems to have fallen by the wayside

Lovesexy appears as a single unsequenced track making it seem like an oddity

did it really sell more on CD than on cassette and LP combined tho?

well those formats were unsequenced too iirc, just divided into two sides

yeah besides promo copies the Lovesexy vinyl wasn't banded

Lovesexy was reissued in Europe in 2006 with the CD broken into individual tracks.

Since they've both been mentioned in the past 24 hours, here's something that happened in Minneapolis last night:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=92&v=FgQ57Gv7W7k

The chief cultural legacy of Wu-Tang Forever is the Triumph music video. Almost everything else seems to have fallen by the wayside

― guardians of the gums: i am tooth (voodoo chili), Wednesday, September 5, 2018 10:30 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like Deck's "bomb atomically" verse is pretty iconic and referenced often

referenced upthread in fact:

iirc, up to that point, killa beez had sold fifty gold, sixty platinum.

re: talk of PE's Apocalypse '91 as NJ

When it came out I was disappointed by the sparser production style, and always thought it had to do with samples becoming expensive, but I read the wikipedia entry and found out that the album also suffered from the Bomb Squad's tracks being stolen, and that they had to try to recreate them from scratch with an album deadline looming.

Wow, I didn't know that about Apocalypse. I was majorly disappointed by it too (though I had unrealistic expectations based on the preceding two records), apart from one or two songs.

Mumble rap the New Jersey of hip-hop as a genre.

runs away***

Xps to UMS—you’re right, more accurate to say the lasting legacy is Triumph and it’s video.

Forever is extremely amazing, if it’s a New Jersey it may be the best one artistically speaking.

yeah besides promo copies the Lovesexy vinyl wasn't banded

ah! it wasn't exactly a shocking new development for a cassette not to have track markers though, and a) you can still see density in a groove, and b) a tiny proportion of pop album buyers wouldn't just play through a side anyway. I doubt it really made many feel the album was lesser or throwaway.

I read the wikipedia entry and found out that the album also suffered from the Bomb Squad's tracks being stolen, and that they had to try to recreate them from scratch with an album deadline looming.

Hmmm. This is a bit dubious - is Hank's claim that the four-man lineup had an entire albumsworth (or 12) of full tracks, and it's only once they went missing that Chuck, Eric and Keith walked, and a bunch of rookies were hired to try and reconstruct them solely from Hank's own recollection of what they were? If so, you'd think he would have had a writing credit on at least one track.

(Especially since pretty much every non-PE group that worked with the (three-piece) Bomb Squad said that Eric did just about all the work with them, and Hank was mainly involved for the final mix. and IIRC Keith was basically out the door wrt PE, working with Bell Biv Devoe & al, before Fear Of A Black Planet.)

man that is a badly written piece

a tiny proportion of pop album buyers wouldn't just play through a side anyway

not so sure about that. it was exactly as easy to play a single track as it was to play an entire side, and pop fans routinely did that, skipping around from song to song or playing one song over and over. even in the golden age of albums, singles and tracks still ruled.