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

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 !

Wish is clearly The Cure's NJ (and around 1992 these guys were nearly as big as REM)

like what would be the equivalent of having five top ten singles but no real pop cultural presence a decade later - having two that make it into the top forty but the fans don't really rank it as highly as the predecessor? is that really all that interesting?

BEST/MOST "BON JOVI'S NEW JERSEY" ALBUM EVER

@ baaderonixx - hmm, maybe a US versus UK thing? in the US the Cure were almost quantifiably one-quarter as huge as REM, who by 1992 had had four US top-ten hits and steadily increasing album sales (1987: platinum, 1988: double platinum, 1991 and 1992: 4x platinum each) ((though some of that must be later sales). by 1992 the cure had also had four top-tenners back home, but just one in the US, where their 1989 album went double-platinum and their 1992 album went single.

One of the many ways in which we knew something had to change about counting record sales in the pre-Soundscan era is how country and college radio acts were consistently under-counted. By 1989 the Cure were selling out Dodger Stadium, Depeche Mode had reached that stage a year earlier, and Morrissey was almost there. None of their Billboard album peaks before late spring '91 reflected their actual sales.

Okay, that's a good point, I didn't realize that!

yeah Dr C, I don't know - I was living in California at the time and a new Cure album definitely felt like a massive event (granted, maybe not Bon Jovi massive but then we're really gonna run out of bands to talk about)

xpost
Thankx Dr C ! I don't know why the search engine couldn't find it...
As for Cure not being big enough to qualify, yeah, I disagree. They were not Pavement level at the time !

i still don't really think wish is a nj

The immediate followup to Wish, released, say, a year or two later, might've been a NJ, but Wild Mood Swings was released four years later in a different era and diminished expectations, therefore I conclude that the Cure don't have an NJ.

*stamp*
next !

Is The 20/20 Experience or Man of the Woods worthy of consideration?

Also am looking at a list of Super Bowl halftime shows and seeing if there are many corollaries...

(granted, maybe not Bon Jovi massive but then we're really gonna run out of bands to talk about)

yup! "huge artists" at Bon Jovi scale are rare, and so are NJs. but if we had a thread about flightless birds, would you really say "look, we've probably covered most of them, how about we move on to sparrows and chickadees? love those little guys!"

20/20 felt like a NJ but damn did I hear Mirrors and Suit and Tie on the radio all the fucking time for about a year

Justified - 10 million
FutureSexLoveSounds - 10 million
The 20/20 Experience - 6 million

And worldwide mega launch and a single that was everywhere...

mercury rev

secret migration was shit

only good song was that one from laurel canyon, after that they dipped into mediocre new age wank also - the collabs on the avalanches record were tie dyed cock eyed bullshit tbf.

siiiiiiiigh

xpost flag post