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

Way upthread, I tried to argue that Hello Nasty sort of avoided NJ-dom in unusual ways. The goofiness of the videos in particular made all the Hello Nasty hits feel sort of halfway like novelty hits, not "event" releases. As well, it wasn't really surprising in any way that the next album didn't connect - as 1980s old-school rappers, they were effectively living on borrowed time. Very few others of their generation were still racking up hits in the early 00s! The miracle was that they'd successfully remained relevant and popular as long as they had, in large part by changing up their sound a couple of times already.

In any case, unless you're Boston, six years is a lonnnng time between albums for the NJ feeling to be there. By 2004, the new album couldn't in any sense be riding the momentum of 1998-era Beastie mania - if it had succeeded it would have been clearly as a comeback album.

wait what no one thought HN was as a hollow effort

when "Intergalactic" went massive in the late summer of '98 I thought they could ride that popularity forever; no way did I think in retrospect that the success felt hollow.

there's that too! i mean i think it's a little overlong, some of the mood-piece and DJ showcase tracks could be pared back, but i don't think anything in their later career decline could be traced to this album.

wait what no one thought HN was as a hollow effort

Yeah, I guess I was forgetting that "hollowness" was a part of what we are considering with a New Jersey. I guess I was just more focused on how it felt like a huge event release that was their last commercial (and critical, I would say), peak.

Hello Nasty is their third best album

It was def an event

Somebody in England has one hell of a Beastie Boys souvenir.

A giant sardine can which was used to unveil the Beastie Boys' latest release in London got its own "Hello Nasty" when thieves took off with the 3D billboard centerpiece last week.

England's "Dot Music" reports that the 10-ft long can, which set back their U.K. label, Parlophone, over $30,000, contains life-sized replicas of the group members. It's been on display at various sites around the U.K. and had only been put up in its new location next to London's Waterloo Station the previous day.

A label spokesperson told "Dot" that they were hoping that the theft was just a student prank and that the giant tin will soon be returned to its rightful place.

Meanwhile, anybody knowing the whereabouts of the tin are being asked to call Parlophone.

as 1980s old-school rappers, they were effectively living on borrowed time. Very few others of their generation were still racking up hits in the early 00s!

Old skool rap was very much in fashion in 1998, though. Even the Unkle record had Kool G Rap on it!

ok but like, who else had a hit album on the charts? even LL Cool J was kind of lost after the big Mr. Smith hits in '96.

LL had a #1 album in 2000 and yet another renaissance in the early to mid '00s with J-Lo hits.

I guess I meant specifically in the radio landscape of 1998.

Alot of the Beasties late '90s success was down to them finally getting fully absorbed into Alternative Radio. They had a big skater following that wouldn't necessarily have been into other legacy Hip Hop acts.

As McCain says, The Beasties had very little (nothing at all?) to do with old-school rap culture at that point. After their rebrand on Check Your Head, they were competing with artists on the alternative charts, not on the hip-hop charts or the Hot 97s of the world. LL was their peer coming up but their careers were incredibly different at that point.

It's more complicated, though. HN invoked the spirit of old school hip-hop in the same year as the UNKLE album.

UNKLE was not exactly indicative of...uh... anything having to do with hip hop in the U.S. (or anywhere I'm assuming), but yeah at that time they were more competing with Beck, stuff like that

yea when I got to know the Beasties they were definitely closer to Sublime or Cake than old-school rap

I'm pretty sure the Source didn't review them anymore by this time

UNKLE was not exactly indicative of...uh... anything having to do with hip hop in the U.S. (or anywhere I'm assuming), but yeah at that time they were more competing with Beck, stuff like that

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown),

You misread me. The UNKLE album has a B-Boys appearance. Tracks like HN's "Three MC's and One DJ" are conscious callbacks to another kind of delivery and production. I did not suggest HN has a dialogue with Jay-Z, DMX, Master P, Black Star, etc. C'mon, you know this.

Beasties didn’t have a New Jersey let’s stop this lol

amen

Mods, plz ban everyone but ums from posting in this thread, thanks.

alfred totally I was more responding to deflatormouse (also Kool G Rap doesn't really have an old school flow, despite age he had more in common with Lox than Beasties), plus that song had Lateef and Lyrics Born so I think it was being current not retro)

Amidst this deeper look at the Beasties, we should examine the possibilities of their “Together Forever” tourmates Run-D.M.C having what may be the first rap New Jersey with 1988’s Tougher Than Leather. I know, we agreed on triple-platinum albums with multiple Top 10 hits, a requirement that this album unfortunately does not meet.

However, when you look deeper at the qualifications, we, much like the first track on NJ, will realize that “right now the rules we made are meant for breaking”

A counter to the arguments against Tougher Than Leather:

1. Only 1x platinum, following an album (Raising Hell) that only went 3x platinum

Considering how little attention was paid to rap/hip-hop by the mainstream music establishment, and the lack of interest in seeing any real changes in said establishment, one has to believe that if we were not in the pre-SoundScan/Yo! MTV Raps-era, both of these albums would have been certified at around triple these figures.

2. Raising Hell, the Slippery When Wet in this scenario, spawned only 1 Top 10 hit (“Walk This Way”), 1 other Top 30 (“You Be Illin’”), and 1 other Top 60 (“It’s Tricky”).

While the chart listings might say otherwise, Raising Hell definitely met “the one everybody loves” status. To somehow chart 3 singles during an era when Top 40 radio was doing damn near everything it could to avoid playing any rap (anecdote != data, but when I lived in Lexington/Louisville/Cincinnati metro area in 1988, several radio stations openly advertised themselves as playing “absolutely NO rap!”), if you force a radio format to re-invent itself – even temporarily - this should be automatic Slippery status.

3. “Tougher Than Leather” did not follow the trad NJ phenomenon where the 1st single (“Run’s House”) seemed so much like an extension of the previous album to where it ends up being as big – if not more - of a hit as those singles. Is it not a Fairweather Johnson?

No. The radio landscape in ’88 for rap was still extremely unwelcoming, and the emerging pop-rap scene was getting most of the (still miniscule) airplay. Tougher Than Leather’s singles were less-poppy than Raising Hell’s (as were Paul’s Boutique’s vs License To Ill’s). Radio made a slight movement towards rap - just not their rap. Still, “Mary, Mary” hit 75 on the Billboard Hot 100, and the album hit #9, which was a massive deal in that era.

Fortunately, the case gets better:

1. Event: Unless I am missing a major ad campaign pushing Paid In Full or Crushin’, it appears that Tougher Than Leather was the first major event rap album in the MTV era – the “World Premiere Video”, the cardboard cutouts at the shopping-mall record stores, and most notably, the accompanying movie.

2. I also want to point out how similarly the careers of Bon Jovi and Run-D.M.C. parallel each other through their respective NJs:

a. Both groups had 2 albums before their commercial breakthrough, slowly building their fanbases with minor hits that remained in their live playlists up through their respective NJs

Bon Jovi:
Bon Jovi (1984) – featuring their first video to get MTV airplay (“Runaway”)
7800 Fahrenheit (1985)
Slippery When Wet (their Slippery When Wet, of course, 1986)
New Jersey (their - you're getting good at this - New Jersey, 1988)
Obligatory Greatest Hits Album (1991)
Keep the Faith (their Keep The Faith, 1992)
Crush (2000) – their first album with a Max Martin appearance
Bounce (2002) – their first album named after a commercial product

Run-D.M.C.:
Run-D.M.C. (1984) – first video to get MTV airplay (“Rock Box”)
King of Rock (1985)
Raising Hell (their Slippery When Wet, 1986)
Tougher Than Leather (their New Jersey, 1988)
Back From Hell (their Keep The Faith, 1990)
Obligatory Greatest Hits Album (1991)
Crown Royal (2001) – their first album named after a commercial product, and with a Fred Durst appearance

3. The “feeling”: By the time both bands released their 3rd singles from their respective New Jerseys, you could sense the change in which artists were going to be dominating the center of their respective genres. MTV’s “Hard 30” and “Yo!” exposed fans of both groups to heavier and poppier alternatives, while radio added more artists from both genres to their playlists, leaving less space for later singles from TTL & NJ’s album cycles. You could feel the ground shifting - while they were still successful, there was a strong sense that their time in the cultural center was coming to an end. Since it was happening to both bands at the same time, that just adds to the wildness.

I mentioned the unkle album b/c it was criticized for assimilating everything that happened to be fashionable at that moment. xp

ahhh sorry gotcha

Has anyone in this thread ever mentioned Vitalogy?

I doubt anyone thought the album was hollow and augured a downturn.

Pearl Jam have no NJ

Maybe it's not a New Jersey by definition, but Riot Act sure is a fucking drag.

Tougher Than Leather definitely feels like a New Jersey especially being caught up in the passage of an era

Good run dmc post

Bon Jovi: These Days (their These Days, kicks off w/a song called "Hey God")

Run-DMC: Down With The King (their These Days, all about God)

Good post, I'm buying it: Tougher Than Leather is a NJ. I'm also on board with Hello Nasty. Pearl Jam had a very different career arc where they had an absolute smash debut with almost overnight huge mainstream superstardom, and their whole subsequent career was a managed decline where they successfully cultivated their (slowly) diminishing/ageing flock of devoted fans.

Prefecture's argument for Tougher Than Leather is excellent. Hats off for putting all that together.

Rowdy! I thank you and the thread for giving me the vocabulary to explain this phenomenon.

I doubt anyone thought the album was hollow and augured a downturn.

It didn't debut at #55, though: it debuted near the bottom of the Billboard 200 on the basis of vinyl sales, then catapulted to #1 the following week, still the biggest leap in history.

"Better Man" and "Corduroy" were on album rock radio for yeeaaaars.

I'd feel better about No Code, but, again, the band deliberately experimented and deliberately wanted their fan base shorn. Not quite the same as a Fore! or Spellbound offering exactly the same as their predecessors.

uh correction:

It didn't debut at #1, though: it debuted at #55 on the basis of vinyl sales

"Better Man" is a concert favorite still, as is "Corduroy" and "Nothingman". lots of fans (me included) adore that album.

the 'hits' weren't as big, but the main difference is that Pearl Jam sort of intentionally sought to go a less commercial direction after Ten, so the hits were always going to be smaller in stature. Vs kind of hedged its bets in that regard, but Vitalogy definitely moved them further into less commercial territory.

I don’t know, as a college student at the time at a midwestern school (so absolutely the target audience) it was an undeniable event upon release, but ultimately had fewer hits/memorable songs than VS. and it had “Bugs”, which may be you all’s fave track but, again, not in the overwhelmingly white midwestern college milieu I was in. Although looking at the charts I see No code debuted at #1 and the fell off very quickly.

I mean, I was also a college sophomore at the time in a midwest state school and even though people clowned on "Bugs" and "Stupid Mop", I can assure you that none of my PJ worshipping friends found that album hollow. It was inescapable and I would argue that it spawned more "classic" PJ anthems than even Vs.

OTM. Their best album imo.

For the Biggest Rock Band in the World to release "Bugs" on a hotly anticipated album is some Bowie-level shit.

I can't remember if it was the week before or after the release of Vitalogy, but some enterprising pranksters chalked all over campus that PJ was playing at our basketball arena and that tickets would be on sale at 10:00 a.m. that Friday. I think the official count given was around 450 people in line before someone from the ticketing office finally got hipped to what happened and came out to disappoint the throngs. Miss those pre-internet gags sometimes.

haha college kids always used to do shit like that.

the one at my school was "we are paying people $50 to do a in-person study with one of our psychologists" and direct us to the middle of the student union where obviously nobody would show up other than the people who pranked us to laugh at us.

Vitalogy is way too singular to be a New Jersey.

Ok if “hollowness” is meant to be more a creative bankruptcy rather than “a feeling on the part of the listener that the hitmaking days are over“ (which is more how I had it) then I will readily admit Vitalogy is not a New Jersey.

"we are paying people $50 to do a in-person study with one of our psychologists"

I hope it was “Sexual Dysfunction Study” or something like that!

I mean Pearl Jam stayed in pretty regular rotation on rock radio through Yield though, "Given to Fly" and "Wishlist" were all over the place. after that point is where even that started to dry up. and from Merkin Ball, "I Got Id" was a HUGE song on rock radio.

it's hard to argue a New Jersey when the band itself is intentionally trying to make themselves less accessible, which Bon Jovi was decidedly not trying to do.

I feel like maybe if Pearl Jam's trajectory was Vitalogy-Vs-Ten-No Code, then maybe you'd have an argument for No Code.

or _Spellbound_ offering _exactly_ the same as their predecessors.