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

can we new jersey anything?

am i in the new jersey of my life? oh god

It doesn't really matter if the album has big hits on it - it's a definitive feature of New Jerseys that they are successful! ''Signature song'' might be tougher (though it'd make another fun thread: artists whose biggest song is on an album no one cares about now), but ultimately comes down to a version of the ''well, we'd have to wait and see'' issue that concerns evaluating New Jersey status.

re: Gaga, it was in a conversation about the (then-forthcoming) ARTPOP that we got into New Jerseyism in the first place - but in reference to Born This Way, and the ''successful album that still somehow diminishes the artist'' phenomenon. Each time we circle back to her, it seems more and more clear that yes, it was a New Jersey. Bummer.

Drake "hold on we're going home" feels like a more timeless piece than hotline bling to me but agree with views being the new jersey moment.

Another idea for a thread: artists who were expected to follow with a new jersey album but defied expectations e.g. Radiohead with Kid A instead of releasing OKC2.

was Views an event album though? how many people care abt albums in 2016?

perhaps these days event singles are more likely to signal a career decline

http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7565791/drakes-views-has-over-3-billion-spotify-streams

http://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2016/10/28/six-months-in-the-only-person-who-can-stop-views-is-drake-himself/#78be50d57436

Tomorrow marks six months since Drake’s Views was unleashed onto the world, and in just a relatively short period of time, the hip-hop magnate’s album has proven to be a consistent seller, streamer, and truly one for the history books.. When it first hit streaming platforms, it racked up almost a quarter of a billion plays in just one week (despite the fact that it was only available on Apple Music), and that helped the new title begin with a million-plus opening frame, a truly rare feat saved for the biggest the industry has ever known.

i dunno, "As of August 2016, it has sold 1.4 million copies in the United States" which is not too impressive

Hotline Bling and One Dance account for 50% of the album's streams while the least streamed track on the album has 23.5 million listens so I'm not entirely convinced it's a hit album as much as hit singles...

Jill Stein crowdfunding for a recount after suspected Russian hacks.

I don't think it makes to much sense to think of streaming as purchases - most users are streaming for free, it's more like radio airplay with users as DJs (and treating streams as radio airplay is probably why Views performs well on the Billboard chart but not equivalent to sales performance)

I imagine these "records" nicely follow the general development in streaming growth https://www.statista.com/statistics/367739/spotify-global-mau/

For such a supposedly popular artist, it's amazing that I've never heard a single note of this Drake fellow's music in my life. Is he any good? Music is so weird and fragmented now.

oh come ON there's no way man

I don't even OWN a Drake

Is he any good?

No

*adds third thing to mrsnrub.txt*

hotline bling bangs

the only thing that might make views *not* a new jersey is that i don't think it's actually much different from his earlier albums quality-wise lol

Not a perfect fit but I suddenly thought ofSoul Asylum's Let Your Dim Light Shine just now, and it feels like a suitable contender

the 90s was pretty populated by poorly selling follow-up albums by alt-rock bands who had sizable success with their last album but shed most of their old fans

i.e. Dear You by Jawbreaker

Everclear's Scenes From An American Dream?

That did not seem like an event at the time, in my memory. A big (badly-calculated) release but nobody gave a shit.

Was actually just talking about NJ-dom in movies last night; my friends voted for Eraser for Arnold (over True Lies, which imo is a bigger event and more hollow in hindsight) just cause after the fact it doesn't even have the look/feel of a titanic blockbuster starring the biggest action hero on earth. And certainly everything after that point seems VERY diminished versus his heyday. But they also concurred with our earlier discussion of how his timeline is kind of confused by Last Action Hero, etc.

Dissolve's Forgotbusters: Movie Hits That Audiences Forgot

p4k claims Adele's 25 is a New Jersey:

And in 2017, a strong year for albums—the entire Urban Contemporary category alone would make a fine Album of the Year slate—the voters couldn't find anything more compelling for the main event than Justin Bieber, post-peak Drake, Sturgill Simpson, and a particularly cursory Adele. While 21 defined the zeitgeist and carried the industry in sales for two years, 25 sold well and didn't linger. 25 is the “Set Fire to the Rain” to 21's “Rolling in the Deep."

25 is the third single from 21, 21 being the lead single from 21

A third single that is/was still pretty massive.

I think the most recent NJ could be Prism: "Roar" seems to be the only single whose shelf-life has lasted beyond it's initial chart run.

in fuckin' 2015 colleagues claimed 25 was already a NJ. And the album's already at least matched its predecessor's sales.

No one has a clue how well Adele will do in three years.

well, she is a singer, singer

Sia fits the bill here I think. "1000 Forms of Fear" was a huge album commercially and did fairly well critically, but it's definitely the moment the train went off the tracks. It's a shame because the album that came before "We Are Born" is probably her best.

sia is still minting number ones so idk

Ehhhh, idk, pretty hard to argue that there's a "career decline" when the album put forth as a New Jersey is basically her breakthrough, she's only had one album after, and that more recent album has sold as many or more copies than the breakthrough, AND netted her her first #1 on a bunch of charts.

xpost

Yeah I think I'm off the mark here - it's an artistic decline in terms of quality but Sia is still hugely successful.

"Peter Gabriel's Us, maybe? "

I scrolled thruogh the thread to see if this was there. Seems to definitely qualify. This was essentially his last album of his (well, he only really release one new album since then), there was a massive, multi year tour after it, at least 4 singles...and none of them had staying power. Note that I rate the album pretty highly and really love it, and loved the three shows I saw in support of it, but it seems like a weird abberation now for sure.

last album of HITS i mean

Us may be an outlier but it doesn't feel hollow

hard to argue for gabriel when he's only released one proper studio album of new material since, ten years after "us", and that album doesn't even seem to have aimed for serious chart success. it's like arguing "the sensual world" as kate bush's "new jersey".

25's sales don't disqualify it from being a new jersey, from the OP: 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.

http://pitchfork.com/news/72471-drakes-more-life-goes-no-1-sets-streaming-record/?mbid=homepage-more-latest-and-video

that settles the question regarding "Views" as a "New Jersey"... no decline yet for Drizzy !
(that said, even before "More Life", I disagreed with the idea of "Views" being a "New Jersey")

Yeah people get carried away when it comes to drake, lol. Pure wishful thinking. He's not going anywhere.

i was loudly naysaying the Drake idea upthread, he's the biggest artist in the world, has been for 2 years. makes no sense to suggest otherwise!

(quickly ctrl-f's) no one's mentioned Christina Aguilera's _Back to Basics_

Wasn't that more like a peak for her?

Let's see, Stripped sold 13 million copies, Back to Basics sold 5 million (though it was a double album, so more like 2.5 million?)

and the next album sold 330,000

I'm probably remembering through my own lens, but Back to Basics felt like the reinvention album that bought her career extra time, at a time when pop radio was rapidly moving away from the teen stars of her generation. It felt really fresh and lively and still kinda does to me. That persona fit her very well. She'd also kind of boxed herself in with the whole Xtina personality, as lucrative as that was for a time, so this album seemed like a successful correction to that

Not buying Back to Basics as an "event" even if it did sell 5 million worldwide. US sales were 1.7 mil, which doesn't even put it in the top ten sellers of the year, and way way off of her earlier sales even if you account for state of the CD market by 2006. Only the first single made the top ten, the next couple slumped and the last two didn't chart. Throw in the gimmicks of her taking on a new persona and the prewar sonics and it starts to look more like a Chris Gaines. If anything Stripped would be the New Jersey here in terms of her career arc, but I'm not sure whether Xtina fans view it as hollow in any sense.

Pretty sure that if this thread has proven anything, it's that not every huge artist has a New Jersey. Also, New Jersey is awesome.

I feel like Christina Aguilera's decline came more from being unable to keep up with changing pop landscape that occurred between the two albums, where artists that were huge in 2006 were no longer to be found in 2010. Like she teased a shift to a more electronic based sound with "Keeps Gettin Better" from her Greatest Hits album in the fall of 2008, but by the time she was ready to release her 2010 album the world had already embraced Lady Gaga and the like, and thus seemed to be lagging behind everyone else.

It seems weird, when you have a case study like Aguilara, why acts are still taking 3 or 4 years between albums