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

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

go ahead flag me, not like i care son

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

― President Keyes, Friday, September 7, 2018 11:57 AM (twenty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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.

haha katherine on point as always

i've read the description 800 times thanks, but one of the other qualifiers is that the singles fade from memory, and Mirrors in particular has seemingly stuck in the public consciousness as much as any of the Futuresex singles

20/20 Experience is an interesting example because the drop-off was immediately apparent with the sequel album released later in the year that everybody instantly forgot about.

Wish isn't a New Jersey, "Friday I'm in Love" is remembered & played often on radio / in movies / over pharmacy PA's.

i think 20/20 was floated once before but it may be a stronger candidate now that we have the followup to evaluate. man of the woods got to #1 and produced two top-ten singles but i think it'd be hard to argue it didn't feel like a major step down in his event-ness. possibly that album might come to seem a mini-NJ in itself, or possibly he becomes one of those artists who reaches a lower-than-their-peak-plateau but never stops being convincingly huge, can always get at least one or two singles to go big, etc.

a new jersey unto himself

PK - I get where katherine's coming from - "on the radio all the fucking time for about a year" made it sound like you were talking about the album's immediate life cycle, not the presence of "Mirrors" in the public consciousness more recently. there was definitely a period where it was almost impossible not to hear it, maybe in part because it was so god damned long, but my experience is that it's kinda vanished a bit since? not totally uncommon for a pop single to fade for a while in the years just after its peak though, people get tired of it.

20/20's best qualitative indicator might be that it really felt like a rehash at the time... like even people who liked those songs were like "i mean he's doing the same old tricks he could do in his sleep, but he does them well!" that feels right imo and also suggests a possible future where radio playlists don't really need "mirrors" because they have "what goes around," and so the album really starts to disappear. i could see that happening. right now it's like the album feels like a NJ taken by itself, but it's too soon to say if he has a NJ career arc surrounding it.

I hear Suit and Tie on A/C Radio all the damn time

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

I think it almost fits because of general fan consensus: it's a big step down from the expansiveness and quality of the previous two, but also it's the last actually good album. posters here are probably still wish-ing that they get just one more of the deluxe editions out, 12 years after the series ran aground and eight years after the botched Disintegration lurched out

Wish was still super-popular, Friday was one of their biggest hits and has had massive legs in airplay, placements and as a half-arsed reference normies can make, they had a concert movie released in cinemas worldwide, enough people signed real paper petitions that Smith agreed to get on planes again to cross the globe. but really, nobody thought it was the next step to world domination

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

ha ha, splitting up before releasing anything else is a great way to retroactively suggest that the jog was up

can we stop the Mercury Rev mentions

"What is Belly's NJ?"

<q>after the botched Disintegration lurched out</q>

why botched?

Damn, if Wish is a New Jersey than it's the greatest New Jersey ever because that is a solid album.

PK - I get where katherine's coming from - "on the radio all the fucking time for about a year" made it sound like you were talking about the album's immediate life cycle, not the presence of "Mirrors" in the public consciousness more recently. there was definitely a period where it was almost impossible not to hear it, maybe in part because it was so god damned long, but my experience is that it's kinda vanished a bit since? not totally uncommon for a pop single to fade for a while in the years just after its peak though, people get tired of it.

Top 40 playlisting has also changed a lot in the past decade alone in terms of how long/which older songs get airplay

why botched?

remastering two discs of bonus material but then putting one of them only on a limited-edition website streaming in 128, doing an expanded Entreat but resequencing it to replicate the album, and allowing Robert to remaster it himself into a sludge that was then brickwalled

you're right, the Dodger Stadium performance was a myth

Entreat was recorded at Wembley and they didn't play the album in order there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

not that it was an eregious violation to make a fake-ish live version, just that it would have made more sense to include the third disc of demos and rarities, and to do the full Wembley show as a separate issue. the previous two waves of deluxe editions had benefited from having multiple albums released simultaneously, and it would have both felt like more of a themed event to have two out, and made each one a better release rather than a stilted hybrid.

also, to have someone who hadn't gone so deaf from standing in front of huge speakers for decades that he likes Jason Cooper's drumming remastering Boris Williams' drumming.

i love this whole bonkers thread but sometimes it feels like people are trying to play the parlor game with their favorite acts rather than noting those who may have subsequently occupied a similar cultural space as Bon Jovi did in the late 80s, as much as that's possible

like i just opened the whole thread and ctrl+F'd for Maroon 5 and got nothing. i don't know their discography outside songs for jane and a couple of the later singles but they def feel like a band who have a New Jersey, probably from right around the time levine started cashing checks from work outside the band. i dunno, maybe i'm wrong. does lenny kravitz have a NJ? he hasn't been mentioned either. michael bolton? red hot chili peppers have been mentioned twice (by the way was nominated both times)--90s and later they've always felt like a kind of la version of BJ to me.

the prince discussion feels especially intangible since lovesexy dropped only four months before NJ itself... you can directly compare them in almost every particular if you want, no need for the kind of speculation that surrounds later acts who find themselves in changed circumstances

Can an entire genre have a New Jersey? If so, I nominate Tha Dogg Pound’s Dogg Food for gangsta rap. That album reached #1?

*barely audible* if by the way counts then that is a new jersey that i think is legit very good

does anyone on ILX know maroon 5's discography enough to comment? the main thing i know about them is that they are terrible. i guess they must have fans and an identity but, despite levine's ubiquity, they've always struck me as truly faceless, almost incapable of being "huge" no matter how many albums they sell or how many TV shows their frontman hosts. still, numbers-wise they might make it to hugeness....

trying to parse them just on quantitative measures it's tough to me to say they have one. despite earlier successes their greatest moment of pop-culture ubiquity was from 2010 to 2012 - "Misery," "Moves Like Jagger," "Payphone," "Daylight," the forgotten #1 "One More Night," and Levine's turn on "Stereo Hearts." but in terms of album sales, their 2010 and 2012 albums did considerably worse than their previous releases, and not measurably better than the two since, which have continued spinning out top 20 singles, none of which i can recall from the titles. obviously this is a reflection of the era - in 2000, with singles performing like that, they'd be looking at like 6x platinum album sales or more. were any of these albums really marketed as albums (let alone as "events")? i honestly have no idea.

Maroon 5 has got to be the most popular band that gets absolutely zero attention from ILM. They aren’t even interesting enough to be bad and hated like Dave Matthews.

if Lenny Kravitz has one it'd have to be 5 based on sales/pop cultural presence, sense of hollowness, and complete tanking of his recording career in subsequent years. but its event-ness is hard to appraise - it was a slow seller that gained momentum as increasingly bad but hooky singles got dug up, or added on to it. it was definitely not an event when "If You Can't Say No" first hit radio... "Are You Gonna Go My Way?" was still getting recurrent play but aside from that he was not arriving to that album with any star presence or anything. he's enough of a household name that i kinda buy him as a "huge artist" but....

First of all, the singles from Songs About Jane are good.

Secondly, what is a Fairweather Johnson? I forgot. I know it's Hootie. I think Maroon 5 have that or an NJ with It Won't Be Soon Before Long. Went 2x platinum in America, peaked at #21 on the Top 200. Songs About Jane peaked at #15 and went 4x platinum. The singles from the first record got a TON of radio and airplay in 2002 when MTV was still playing videos semi-regularly or at least enough to break a band. Constant rotation. I still hear those singles out today. Can't remember anything from the second record, released in 2007. Too much of a gap? Eh, the singles from Jane had legs. They toured on that record for years. I don't remember much excitement in 2007 - sort of feels like Maroon 5 records just happen, you don't anticipate them. But it wasn't the death knell.

The next album Hands All Over came out in 2010 and doesn't make much impact... until the fourth single - "Moves Like Jagger" - became a surprise hit nearly a year later, and arguably became more popular than any of the Jane singles. At this point, they can kind of just exist at that Starbucks wine mom plateau forever as long as Levine stays on TV and out of trouble.

ok I see now that the third paragraph completely negates the second paragraph, I was merely trying to convey what a strange / unique trajectory Maroon 5 have had.

fairweather johnson = technically a big seller, maybe heavily anticipated, but all the sales were right upfront (pure momentum from predecessor) and even *at the time* people knew the jig is up, usually evidenced by the singles doing badly and/or the first single doing well but them dropping off from there. so it's a successful album on paper but the career decline is evident and profound before the promo campaign has even run its course.

hootie fit this to a T from having such an enormous smash beforehand that they could get to #1 and go double platinum with an album where almost nobody who doesn't cultivate playlists of forgotten 90s singles can even recall that lead single "old man and me" ever existed. supposed former infatuation junkie is comparable in scale, but even that had "thank u" which made some kind of cultural impression.

"Old Man And Me" seems due for CVS reappraisal.

At this point, they can kind of just exist at that Starbucks wine mom plateau forever as long as Levine stays on TV and out of trouble.

They get Clear Channel pop radio play, and their Cardi B collaboration "Girls Like You" sits at #2. Th

My mom bought my brother Fairweather Johnson on release date cos he wanted it. He played it during dinner and my mom decided she hated it almost immediately, continually saying "I'm not hearing anything" after every song.

He turned it off but he loved it probably to spite mom.

God is dead.

btw re: Hands All Over - not sure what you mean about it sleeping til 4th single, "Misery" was the lead and it had a big footprint. peaked at #14 but it was on the radio forever. Oh yeah-eh!

xp Imagining that dinner scene is bringing me great joy