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

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.

it was exactly as easy to play a single track as it was to play an entire side

of course it wasn't! not that it was super-hard, but you have to be next to the record player at the start and the end of the track. and to carefully find the exact spot to drop the needle. as opposed to just putting it on and then walking away or sitting down or playing a game or playing with the cat or making out or reading a book or staring at the ceiling and listening.

Yeah clearly : listening to cassettes and LPs was a totally different experience due to that (even though, of course, you could fast forward the cassette, find the exact spot for the needle etc but it wasn't the easiest and most common way to listen to these.
So yeah, Lovesexy's 1 track thing was only an issue on cd (and now on mp3 !).
Has another artist tried to do that gimmick again, by the way ?

not that it was super-hard, but you have to be next to the record player at the start and the end of the track. and to carefully find the exact spot to drop the needle.

it was super-easy! if the record player was playing, you were in the same room as the record player! it's not like you put it on in your bedroom and then moved on to the living room. you had to be close by if you wanted to hear it. and finding the exact spot to drop the needle wasn't exactly brain surgery. pick up needle, move needle to band between songs, drop needle. it was as natural and ingrained as hitting the play button on your phone is now. (phone vs. phono! fight!) and for most people, it required no more care than that.

Stop, you’re both right

i only listen to lovesexy in serato

Errr why do you have to stay next to the vinyl deck to listen to the music !? They were (and are) connected to speakers in the room (and even around the house) !

And fast forwarding a cassette was a pain in the ass (and emptied your walkman batteries in a wink)...

my next response to this extremely important vinyl sub-thread would almost assuredly be the vinyl sub-thread's new jersey -- hugely popular and maybe acclaimed now thanks to the pre-existing interest in this sub-thread, but history would not look at it kindly. history might even mock it. bad medicine, as it were. i shall not release that response.

Eheh yeah at one point I was wondering in which thread I was discussing how to find a track on vinyl/cassette... the link with NJ is not obvious !

Errr why do you have to stay next to the vinyl deck to listen to the music !?

to listen to one single track on an LP side, you have to be next to the record player at the end of the song to lift the tone arm

(and even around the house) !

or you can just have your butler do it, I guess

Sorry to interrupt this fascinating sub-topic.
Hip-hop seems a fertile genre for NJs (careers seem to rise and crash faster).

50 cents “Massacre” could be a good one (sold pretty massively yet has left no mark in pop history)

yeah otm for 50.
Was there a consensus about Jay-Z's ?
I can't really think of one...

Blueprint 2

Eminem's would be Encore, maybe ?

Now way ! There's the Black Album after !

And even the Blueprint 3 had almost an equivalent success 3 albums later...

50 Cent's The Massacre is def the most New Jersey rap album of all time, though.

― some dude, Tuesday, August 7, 2012 11:04 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my conviction is that THE MASSACRE is the last "core" new jersey. (....)

― got the scuba tube blowin' like a snork (Doctor Casino), Thursday, August 30, 2018 10:53 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oops. Should have done a search in thread

Hip Hop is a different beast, it seems to me, in that a lot of times an artist, like Coolio for instance, will just fall off after a huge hit album because times have moved on so fast.

Jay's fake retirement kinda muddies the waters with him wrt a New Jersey...

agree with the Massacre

Coolio had a big album and hits but he was never perceived as a dominant force in hip hop even at his peak. 50, Jay, and Eminem are at least in the position to have a New Jersey in the first place.

Coolio was a guy who had some massive singles but it’s not like the album itself, while it was a big seller, had any cultural impact vs the songs making their own separate impacts. The albums are just delivery systems for a couple massive hits. Which is obv very common, it’s like idk Ace of Base or The Wallflowers. Coolio was also perceived as more a “personality” than he was an artist, probably and perhaps unfortunately.

Did The Cure have a NJ ?

The Massacre is a good choice (my favorite 50 album too).

I couldn't remember ANY single from it. After checking it out, turns out I didn't like any single (except "Hate it or Love it" but it was from the Game's album anyway).

for The Cure I imagine maybe Wish?

Yeah seems right. Even The Cure's fans don't really like it, I think !

wish largely rules imo

weird album as far as fans go. i absolutely love it.

omar and ums OTM re: Coolio. as for Eminem, Encore is what ended up in the poll but it never felt very settled. imho Encore really feels more like a Fairweather Johnson - huge sales but it's *purely* momentum and the singles campaign is out of gas halfway through. also the "career decline" is harder to read because he just "retired" for a few years after and returned to cooled-down hype and expectations. The Eminem Show *feels* way more like a New Jersey, but as croup pointed out, 8 Mile comes out later that same year. you could maybe count them together as his New Jersey moment, but then you've got two of his most enduring legacy songs, and with Lose Yourself maybe his biggest song ever, in the "New Jersey" ... which doesn't feel right.

The Cure are probably not huge enough to have one of these - couple of platinum albums but they only have a tiny number of top ten hits and never more than one per album, so hard to see any of them dropping with Jovian hugeness. it's not really surprising that after emerging from comparative obscurity to have a couple of quite successful albums, they didn't replicate that on an ongoing basis.

WISH second only to THE HEAD ON THE DOOR

i think the New Jersey concept scales down nicely to non-HUGE acts

and HOTD otm. I love "Push" but it's a New Jersey distilled into a single track imo

... what

The Cure's not big enough.

xxpost I think non-Huge acts need a separate thread though, to avoid all those "Wowee Zowee" type suggestions earlier in the thread.

agreed with keyes - it should be its own thread imho, just because it will spawn a thousand overlapping artist-specific discussions as devotees of Apollo 18 and Hail to the Thief and Wilder contest their classification but without larger-than-life hard data to cut through the murk. croup was right to police this boundary of the thread imo, we're dealing with a specific phenomenon of mega-successful albums here and some aspects of that actually don't scale at all.

I can't find the New Jersey poll thread !