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

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

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.