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

oh man i never noticed if you scroll over that little bar at the end you see the number. well, down the wormhole i go.

well that's now let me confirm that the "popular" tracks aren't necessarily the artist's ten biggest. i.e. "the first part" and "detroit has a skyline" have more spins than "precision auto"

no way RAM is Daft Punk's NJ surely?? isn't it more like Human After All? ah what do i know i've proven crap at this New Jersey game so far.

things you need to play the new jersey game like a true pedantic champ

1. a willingness to consult wikipedia or your local library
2. the ability to count
3. the determination to utilize 1 & 2 even though you knooooooow this album was commercially overrated based on anecdotal evidence
4. the strength to move on when stats suggest the artist may not have had a big event album whose relative success was clearly built off the work before it more than the material itself, as proven by the big drop on the following album

Slippery When Wet - 12m sold, two #1s ("Livin On A Prayer," "You Give Love A Bad Name") and a third top ten ("Wanted Dead Or Alive")
New Jersey - 7m sold, two #1s ("Bad Medicine," "I'll Be There For You") and three more top tens ("Born To Be My Baby," "Lay Your Hands On Me," "Living In Sin")
Keep The Faith - 2m sold, one top ten hit ("Bed Of Roses")

based on this information, it shouldn't be hard to figure where Daft Punk goes in the New Jersey game (clue: #4)

the flipside of 3 is when you don't want to admit an album was commercially puffed up. a personal example: admitting that the 4xplatinum Monster with hits like "Bang And Blame," "Strange Currencies" and "Star 69" hasn't had the same kind of hold as the 4xplatinum Automatic For The People with hits like "Man On The Moon," "Everybody Hurts" and "Nightswimming." But personal taste aside, i can't deny it.

i guess daft punk are wayyyy bigger in europe, especially france, than in the US. but still not bon jovi big, i don't think. certainly as far as this thread goes, they basically are not, definitionally, a "huge artist" and thus cannot have a new jersey.

but even if we look at world sales, they had two hit-enough-for-electronica albums, a turkey, and then a huge album with their biggest hit ever.

if the album after random access goes platinum off the ill-remembered "Groovy Times (feat KC and John Legend)" and then the one after that flops, the former could be fathomably a new jersey. but massiveness aside they haven't even had the arc.

thanks for that research doc casino, really interesting

i think a big stumbling block for people is the desire to leave it at "ooooh this album is so overrated" so you get people bringing up neutral milk hotel cuz they're still mad at their roommate for playing it all the time (honestly impressed nobody's pulled this with the new carly rae jespen album). it's just aggravating when you can truly grasp the beauty of a true new jersey - an album that surprises you with how big it was in hindsight, considering its relatively modest status compared to its predecessor today.

and, just in case it wasn't clear from my use of the word "pedantic," i'll cop that this is all silly nerd parlor game shit.

But really fun silly nerd parlor game shit! I've always enjoyed this whole New Jersey discourse for precisely these reasons. Also becomes a door through which to explore a different time in music promotion, how bands rise and fall at this scale, and line up numbers and albums and singles with what would otherwise be kind of hard to pin down - how the kind of band that is undeniably huge, Super Bowl huge, t-shirts overflowing mall kiosks and state fairs huge, can lose their footing. Etc.

totally. like here's a fun question - name the four top 40 hits on adrenalize

actually, i'm gonna give away the answer

#12 "have you ever needed someone so bad" (for comparison, "photograph" reached #12)
#15 "let's get rocked" (for comparison, "rock of ages" reached #16)
#34 "stand up (kick love into motion)" (for comparison, "foolin" reached #28)
#36 "make love like a man" (pyromania did not have a fourth top 40 hit)

just for clarification, how do we relate new jersey-ism to a band's success afterwards? bon jovi for example have had a few singles since that that imo have a similar level of cultural cachet to their pre-new jersey hits ('always', 'it's my life'), albeit without giving the band the same level of omnipresence, whereas for probably most artists their new jersey moment will mark something more permanent, bring about a kind of ceiling to their future successes. this is not in itself anything extraordinary, i'm just wondering if in 1500 posts any formula had been developed for it

I remember let's get rocked and have you ever needed someone so bad pretty well, other two do not ring a bell

just for clarification, how do we relate new jersey-ism to a band's success afterwards? bon jovi for example have had a few singles since that that imo have a similar level of cultural cachet to their pre-new jersey hits ('always', 'it's my life'), albeit without giving the band the same level of omnipresence, whereas for probably most artists their new jersey moment will mark something more permanent, bring about a kind of ceiling to their future successes. this is not in itself anything extraordinary, i'm just wondering if in 1500 posts any formula had been developed for it

― Merdeyeux,

you answered your own question, I think

yeah, i think "a career decline" is about as specific as we can be here. there are too many possible paths for a once-omnipresent act, many of which are totally viable existences for a working band (provided they didn't make really bad financial decisions or get hooked on the lifestyle of the top-of-the-charts megastar). but clearly they tend to remain 'big' - once you've had a slippery you'd almost have to be trying to not be able to keep a record contract or generally stay in the biz. very few of the acts that made the canonical poll list here are really punchline names.

in general i'd say that the album after the new jersey marks the real ceiling of future success. that's sort of the whole phenomenon in a nutshell: never woulda guessed, at the time the new jersey was on the charts, that their next album would see them knocked down so far and never recover the new jersey sales, and then after a while you look back and man, that new jersey was kinda not very special either, huh? but at this point i'm just restating the thread title in other words.

"it's my life" is kind of a freak occurrence here; even at the time it felt really bizarre that bon jovi had a hit song and it was on now that's what i call music. it was like "i don't want to miss a thing," this act seemingly from a million years ago.

We should note for the sake of pedantry that "It's My Life" only hit #33, but it seemed bigger.

Jon bon has the tenacity of a cockroach, for sure. While his career declined after New Jersey, he did an admirable job of maintaining a keep the faith level of success after.

did keep the faith flop in the usa? was bloody big here. infact you never hear the 80s stuff on radio much as its always the 90s hits

yup

"EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW" AKA the UK version

On a different track - - - upthread, Old Lunch brought up Stevie Wonder's Journey Through the Secret Life Of Plants as a non-New Jersey way out of Slippery-town: total left-field niche release, clearly not "meant" for most of the people that bought the previous blockbusters, but still somehow softens the blow of the career slipping. Stevie Wonder, I'll say upfront, does not have a Bon Jovi career arc by any means, and had a surprising number of moderate to big successes in the 80s ("surprising" in that, if you didn't know the big singles and learned about the world from reviews/canon/narrative, you'd think he retired from music in 1980).

But if you bracket out Secret Life as not a "real" album release, then you might have a sort of cousin of New Jersey in Songs In The Key Of Life. I say "might" because I always thought of that album as pretty well-beloved, but then I got to ILM and found people pointing fingers and laughing at it, so I honestly don't know how it's thought of in terms of career arc/decline. Maybe more of a "poured everything into a last masterpiece" than "feels a bit hollow," depending who you ask. Hotter Than July is actually a very listenable, fine album, but the "event"-ness is gone and never came back, I think. So Key of Life is maybe somewhere between a Mellon Collie (mega-selling last burst of greatness, followed by immediate, dramatic dropoff in critical and commercial performance) and a White Album (mega-selling last burst of greatness, followed by continued success in a bunch of uneven and occasionally very good albums that are still much admired but rarely seen as equal to the preceding material). I guess maybe what I'm thinking is there needs to be a whole separate taxonomy for the "double albums capping periods of tremendous productivity" narrative. Hello, yellow brick road!

believe me SITKOL is beloved.

he just did a tour performing it

Hotter Than July was massive though?! at least in the UK, huge hits!

ha, yeah, i think i'm really still thinking of this one exchange from nine years ago

Lonesome Crowded West and Songs In The Key Of Life are the only ones I know that are good all the way through, in that Nilsson Schmilsson way where every new track that comes on makes you go, "Fuck! This is good!" There are tons, tons, tons of double albums that more or less acquit themselves, the White Album being the quintessential example, with enough gems to balance out the general lack of focus. But on a single album those kinds of ratios would equal a major bomb, making these types of things a "fans only" thing whose idiosyncracies you come to love... very few artists manage even one SINGLE album that really feels like it needs all its songs, so perhaps I'm holding doubles to a high standard, but really we'll be here all day if we list every double album that's "good" in the White Album sense....

― Doctor Casino (Doctor Casino), Friday, September 8, 2006 7:13 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Songs In The Key Of Life is rubbish all the way through, though (sorry Doc, I've tried for 30 years but I still don't like it; big comedown from the previous three).

― Marcello Carlin (nostudium), Friday, September 8, 2006 7:16 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's my least favorite of his classic albums but it's not rubbish, and, uh, check out these stats: debuted at #1 in the United States, stayed there for three months, is probably diamond in sales if Motown were less tight about its bookkeeping.

the trick is to ignore the 1st 4 tracks AND the final 4 which don't really count anyway. it's one of the worst sequenced albums ever.

yeah songs in the key is still stevie's canonical classic in a lot of senses, critically hailed career artists like stevie and bruce and prince can avoid an outright new jersey more easily than those who don't have that kind of cultural credibility. tunnel love fulfills a lot of commercial requirements but if you think it "feels a bit hollow" i'd say YOU feel a bit hollow, my good sir.

tunnel of love, i mean

think live 75-85 is closer to bruce's new jersey

haha woah, even with the fact that a 5cd box only has to drop 2m copies to go diamond, i was taken aback by how much that's sold. still don't think he has one (in that tunnel of love would have to be the keep the faith) but i agree that box is closer to being one

was just thinking it reminded me of spirits having flown where the album was a hit and had hit songs but still managed to be a big sales disappointment, retail complaint about overstock.

that's closer to the Tusk Clause.

if you were to have a what artists have a huge event album following a big selling album but sells far less BUT is far more loved critically what else would there be apart from In Utero ?
Actually save your answers for a thread on it

What acts have had a huge selling album and the follow up sells far less yet is critically favoured by fans and music critics?

the trick is to ignore the 1st 4 tracks AND the final 4 which don't really count anyway. it's one of the worst sequenced albums ever.

― piscesx, Saturday, September 5, 2015 2:53 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I always thought the record was front-loaded, if anything.

Then I saw him do it live last year. I hadn't listened to the album in years (like Al, it's my least favorite of his classic era), and after "I Wish" I thought, ok, probably nap time now. WRONG. Songs I remembered as duds were impossibly thrilling. Maybe it was just a you-had-to-be-there thing, but it made me seriously revise my opinion of the album.

Of the stevie albums I have its def my least favourite

y'all are mad

SITKOL is hugely acclaimed and beloved. def his most popular album.

Yeah this is nuts, he just this year toured stadiums playing the album!

if you google stevie wonder albums, SITKOL comes up first as "most popular"

did everyone see where i admitted i was basically thinking of one ILX post from a decade ago that merely made me think my sense that it was beloved was mistaken?

parse fail.. Parse fail...

haha I knew that was a horrendous sentence as I was typing it

I can't recall if we ever mentioned Carnival Ride by Carrie Underwood. Her debut Some Hearts was 7x platinum, the biggest selling country record of the 00s, and the follow up had one of the biggest first weeks of the decade, but the singles, especially "Last Name" sure felt hollow. It sold 3 million. Next album 2 million. Fourth album less than that.

25, calling this in advance

the bets start now

It seems highly likely, so good call.

ha yeah, good shout. is/was there a stipulation that the first single off a New Jersey is a smash? cause if so..