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

Coldplay may count. i was gonna say X&Y is theirs but somehow that's their biggest selling album in the UK!?

Viva La Vida is one of their biggest singles - X&Y sounded like a New Jersey but they survived it handily.

I decided I'd rock New Jersey itself this afternoon, but tbh three songs in and I'm not sure how much more I can take.

Bombast! everywhere. This appears to be an album constructed entirely of moments to be hollered along to in stadiums. Which are mostly fine in isolation, actually, but they haven't been knitted together at all. 'Bad Medicine' is completely deranged - there are about six different choruses here, but no verses and no progression; chanting crowds burst in continually; guitar solos like jet engines; the key changes randomly. It reminds me of those Jive Bunny style megamixes that were popular around the same time.

The effect is like reeling around drunkenly inside an iron maiden.

bad medicine is terrible

Worst Summer job ever was working at the Tilly Balloon Co. (the Monster artwork is one of their balloons).
Spending all day "testing" balloons. Put balloon over spigot... send air into balloon... balloon pops in your face 3x outta 10 (no, you DON'T get used to this).

Was still more fun than listening to "Monster" though.

and we could've had more medicine!

The album was initially meant to be a double album; however, this idea was rejected by the record company because they got nervous about the higher price point and decided they would only release a single album

My theory re: New Jersey is that somewhere along the line they and Fairbairn (he produced, right?) realized Hysteria was turning out huge, went "Oh shit" and mixed the album accordingly.

I am trying to work the Foo Fighters into this theory. By all accounts it should be 'There Is Nothing Left To Lose' but my guess is they got even bigger after that?

Yeah. Hysteria added a wrinkle in the seven-singles-plus formula: the fourth and fifth singles could be the biggest ones.

what about the Chili Peppers' By The Way?

Absolutely

only went 2x platinum

also one could argue RHCP has stayed the same, it's just the Modern Rock Chart that's gotten smaller

pretty hard to find New Jerseys that actually did half of New Jersey's numbers in the 2000s on

I am trying to work the Foo Fighters into this theory. By all accounts it should be 'There Is Nothing Left To Lose' but my guess is they got even bigger after that?

― Matt DC, Thursday, August 9, 2012 9:41 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark

almost every FF album has sold more or less the same amount, had more or less the same success with singles, with The Colour & The Shape standing slightly above the others. that kind of workmanlike arc probably is a different matter entirely than too big to fail New Jerseys.

I think Rattle & Hum has to count - as Euler points out, "it had a movie!" It got thrown under the bus later and now seems obviously a minor work, "nothing to see here, practically an EP really" - but it was a huge deal, heavily promoted "event," right? Plus one #3 Hot 100 single, and all four singles peaked pretty high on Mainstream and/or Modern Rock. And in the UK, "Desire" was their first #1! (Pushed there, I think, by momentum from The Joshua Tree - but still.)

Foo Fighters don't have one - "workmanlike arc" is right. Consistent sales, no sense of having a particular BLOCKBUSTER album. I also think they just occupy a weird niche of unfashionable but perennially popular meat-and-potatoes rock that leads people to find them and leave them without necessarily becoming career fans that own all the albums, or at least this was my experience. Hence my assertion on the FF thread that the last good Foo Fighters album is the last one that came out before you were 18 or 19.

yeah as i said, i think Rattle & Hum and Atomic both qualify - feels fitting U2 has two hollow hits to their credit, one pre-sunglasses, one post.

Atomic also won Album Of The Year at the Grammys, to verify its validity here

Like Santana's Supernatural, this album was awarded nine Grammy Awards overall in 2005 and 2006, winning in all of the categories in which it was nominated. It was awarded the Album of the Year award in 2006. "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own" from the album was awarded "Song of the Year" and "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal". "City of Blinding Lights" was awarded the award for "Best Rock Song", and the album was also awarded "Best Rock Album". Album producer Steve Lillywhite was also awarded Producer of the Year, Non Classical in 2006. In 2005, the single "Vertigo" from the album won in all three categories in which it was nominated: "Best Rock Song", "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal", and "Best Short Form Music Video".

I have the misfortune to work for a division which often uses "City of Blinding Lights" as Inspirational Music. U2 as new Vangelis.

Atomic Bomb is so recent though (in my warped perception of time), and I don't really keep up with U2 fans and their discourse - - what's the C.W. on it at this point?

xxpost haha wowwww, okay, yeah, i dunno what the c.w. is but i doubt it measures up to THAT

Best Rock Song two years in a row

Gosh, that was gruelling. It's actually quite intricately put together - there are whole nations' worth of backing vocals - but obviously no subtlety or finesse. It's a bit like attempting the Mona Lisa in marker pen.

Agreed on Rattle and Hum being necessary. Not LEAST for inspiring the Most Legendarily Horrible Piece of Writing On Rock Ever:

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-11-20/entertainment/ca-441_1_rock-band

I read this in fall quarter of freshman year at UCLA, having just moved to Los Angeles for the first time, and immediately learned to mistrust anything Hilburn claimed. This served me well.

...we probably do have to actually poll New Jersey the album at some point, but i don't think i'm ready for that point to arrive. BTW GUESS WHO HAS GODDAMN BAD MEDICINE IN HIS HEAD AGAIN

I'm not sure I'll have space for anything in my head again

Did we even talk about the video? With Sam Kinison and forced cinema verite?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOUtsybozjg

And hair, let us not forget the hair.

U2 has shown a tendency to listen to criticism. For example, there has been occasional grumbling--even from critics and fans who greatly admire U2's work--that the band's high-idealed tales of social conscience and responsibility sometimes gave the impression of a holier-than-thou attitude. Lead singer Hewson, who writes the band's lyrics, stressed repeatedly in interviews in recent years that he was not the man of virtue and honor outlined in such songs as "Pride (In the Name of Love).

Honor (In the Name of Virtue)

In the album's most naked moment, Hewson sings about the struggle of musicians (or all artists) who have to keep reaching deeper and deeper inside themselves for truths.

oh god.

"They may . . . pull off the feat of getting B.B. back on the Top 40 for the first time in a couple of decades and they've surely re-established blues as the musical center of modern rock, which is a prerequisite for restoring a sense of center to pop music and its offshoots."

Don't you tell me what is and isn't a prerequisite, David Marsh!

always dug Neil Tennant's response:

"What [rock critics} basically want is for it to be like 1969 again. It's this thing where British – or in U2's case, Irish – groups discover the roots of American music. U2 have discovered this and they're just doing pastiches [his voice rises] and it's reviewed as a serious thing because DYLAN PLAYS ORGAN on some song and B.B. King plays on some throwaway pop song "When Love Comes to Town" that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It could be in 'Starlight Express' if you ask me."

pull off the feat of getting B.B. back on the Top 40 for the first time in a couple of decades

um, BB had top 40 hits in the 70s and "Love Comes To Town" only made it to #68

Bono's Most Naked Moment, on a stool in Vegas

brilliant Tennant quote.

xpost -- That puts all kinds of wrong images in my head.

a No Bono Stool sign spotted in Vegas:

http://www.wormsandgermsblog.com/no-dog-poop-zone-sign-thumb3238487.jpg

what's with the naked stools lately

"Live Real Bonos!"

blame max

A thousand naked Bono impersonators behind him as he comes to sing his smooth-jazz version of "The Real Bono Vox"...

i'd say Merriweather Post Pavillion, which was a relatively huge event in the indiesphere

This is a thread about the real world.

That is a terrible terrible article, Ned. Thanks! I haven't laughed so much in ages. "Rattle and hum" was a HUGE event in the UK. I can remember a week or so before it came out, some DJ was doing a Radio One roadshow OB from somewhere and was interviewing a lorry driver. "So, what's in the lorry?" asked the DJ. "Thousands of copies of the new U2 album" the driver replied. The DJ and OB audience gave a small collective gasp, as if this driver was carrying the ark of the covenant. It was an EVENT.

some throwaway pop song "When Love Comes to Town" that could have been written by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Tennant seems not to understand that this is a very high standard of pop songcraft!

I want to say that Andrew Lloyd Webber's New Jersey is Starlight Express, but that might require pretending that Phantom of the Opera doesn't exist.

so if it's cool with Upper Miss - since he's the one who came up with this concept - I'd like to put up a poll tomorrow containing the albums I listed plus Rattle & Hum, Adrenalize, How To Build An Atomic Bomb and Step By Step. If anyone can think up an album that went at least 3x platinum in the US (and don't assume it did, because you're probably wrong, especially if it came out after 2000) that also fits the description, please offer it up.

Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water?

Don De Lillo's New Jersey = Underworld.

and actually, as much as I love the hits on 50 Cent's The Massacre I can definitely see the argument so I'll throw that on too.

xpost i really don't have a sense that fans are like 'nookie roolz, rollin' droolz' but what the hey it's not like we have the space.