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

yeah that's my prob w/steel wheels is that no human being on earth thought that they were coming off their "peak" when they released that album

though i guess at the time exile probably wasn't considered a peak either....exile on mainstreet is a pinkerton i guess

pinkertons could be a whole nother thread

no human being on earth thought that they were coming off their "peak" when they released that album

Dirty Work does have its fans

Tattoo You was also a giant seller with several top 20 hits, of which only "Start Me Up" (Hot 100 #2) gets moderate play now, and that only with the shot in the arm that it got from the big Windows 95 campaign, IMO. Despite its big success, I've never seen the album itself get ranked very highly or talked up as a must-own album.

Also, as Wiki puts it: "A very popular album upon release, it is the last Rolling Stones album to reach the top position of the US charts, concluding a string of #1's dating back to 1971's Sticky Fingers." The following albums (Undercover and Dirty Work) sold way, way less and have no staple songs. Not sure I buy the "every Stones album is an event" line with those two.

Dirty Work does have its fans

AYO

Tattoo You gets plenty of love but mostly as a solid Stones album than a crucial one

I also can't help but think of Coldplay's X&Y, which was a big event album in the UK on the back of A Rush Of Blood To The Head. I know it didn't kill their career, but it did yield six singles: 'Speed Of Sound' (UK #2), 'Fix You' (UK #4), 'Talk' (UK #10), with 'The Hardest Part', 'What If' and 'White Shadows' being radio-only in various territories. Only 'Fix You' has left any kind of lasting impression.

Viva La Vida gave Coldplay back some degree of critical acclaim and gave some memorable hit singles ('Viva La Vida', 'Violet Hill'), but it seems they might have made their second X&Y with Mylo Xyloto...

DUDE..."Waiting on a Friend" gets massive airplay -- maybe their most popular second single.

xp to the Doctor

I don't know, Alfred. Been a long time since I've heard that one.

Re: tattoo you being ranked highly, In 1989, it was ranked #34 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. In 2003, the album was ranked number 211 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

granted that's from the magazine where Goddess In The Doorway got five stars, but it suggests legs.

TY frequently gets 4 or 4.5 stars in most assessments of their work. I'm not defending the album, only noting that the album was huge and remains quite popular enough with their fans to remain the Scary Monsters benchmark.

xpost It's from a magazine named after the band being ranked! What else were they going to pad out their 1980s list with?

She's The Boss

haha, okay, i wd concede that Tattoo You may be their Scary Monsters rather than their New Jersey, their Fairweather Johnson, their Blood on the Tracks, or their White Album. I also like the idea that every huge artist ultimately gets to contribute one album as a fundamental rock record type.

As I suggested in the poll thread, the Rolling Stones have three obvious (and all defensible) stepping-off points: Exile, Some Girls, and Tattoo You. Which one you choose is going to be generational with some people, with others a matter of interpretation.

If you want to argue for later than Tattoo You, good luck, you're on your own.

I wrote here or elsewhere a few years ago that without knowing a thing about the degree to which Mick and the band hated each other (or what this period augured) I'd be forgiven for thinking that being a teen and hearing "She's So Cold," "Miss You," "Shattered," "Hang Fire," and "Start Me Up" on the radio and anchored to good to great albums was anything but a fabulous time to be a Stones fan.

Sorta inevitable with bands that have multi-decade careers and have acquired whole new fanbases at different times - it stands to reason they'd also shed those fanbases at different times. This brings us back around to the Wings issue maybe, since the mysterious body of people who sold out Wings arena shows through the 70s and festooned their dorm rooms with Speed of Sound posters does not necessarily line up 1:1 with the girls screaming when the Beatles landed, or the teenagers practicing their Romeo lines from "The Girl Is Mine." (Past a certain point, these groups all converge as they become Dad and buy the coffeeshop albums.)

Does Dylan have one of these? Nashville Skyline presaging Self Portrait? Street Legal?

DESIRE

yep!

quite a few defenders here (not me)

If that's the one after Blood on the Tracks, yes. Neil's, I think, is either Rust, Reactor, or Ragged Glory, depending upon how you look at it. (I'm too close to that one to make the right call--for me, probably Reactor.)

i can see the logic for Nashville, even though I like it. John Wesley being the meaty "ok i'm a rootsy chanteur now" album, Nashville being more campy and broad, Self-Portrait being his first "yeesh" moment.

And yeah, Desire is still ranked highly on that RS top 500 mamajama, another option is Modern Times, which apparently went platinum while Love & Theft only went gold!

A Neil possibility: Mirror Ball

dylan himself said that he made nashville skyline to make ppl not like him anymore, same w/self-portrait

plus nashville skyline has the whole weird voice thing, and I hold that new jerseys can't be stylistic shifts

desire is definitely a new jersey of blood on the tracks, but then again that era spit hot lava all over the motherfuckin' track on the rolling thunder review

i don't think dylan really has one tbh

same w/neil

Self-Portrait is merely his first misstep, which every artist gets and lots of fans forgave him for. The two followups were modest gestures and warm-ups for The Next Statement.

yeah i mean anything under 3x platinum is not really a new jersey, it's just fun to yammer about where the greats got close

re Neil: an artist can have a couple New Jerseys!

i guess a new jersey for a career/cult artist would be the album that signified the end of their glory period (or a glory period), only it was sold and basically accepted as an ongoing part of the glory period initially.

obviously none of these are as fun as a REAL new jersey, which involves hoodwinking more than like a half million nerds

we probably need a different label for a critical or cult version of a New Jersey so we don't keep having these 3x platinum reminders.

xxpost

Under the Bushes, Under the Stars?

yeah i'm trying to think of a blatantly obvious album that was accepted at glorious that the air has dropped out of - I'm thinking Little Creatures but I bet some people will get sandy vadge about that

some people still love that but it was the #1 album in pazz'n'jop and pretty uniformly it's looked at as their weakest album to that point now.

The more culty the act, the harder this gets because you have less and less of a consensus about where they fell off (or if they did so at all).

totally

...although i guess this thread is proof that the 3x platinum smashes are not necessarily reservoirs of consensus...

yeah it's just harder to contradict "that's not how it felt under my rock" belly-achers with STATS

True Storires is a better candidate if we drop the 3x platinum.

it does have the "it had a movie!" card and their least critically respected top 40 hit, even the critics had already lept back a bit.

How can any artist with multiple generations of fans making their albums hits count as having a New Jersey? Isn't one of the reasons New Jersey is the benchmark for this kind of thing because it represented a perceived fleeting high water mark of cultural relevance that would never be approached again? Or at least the album that signified that the artist was a one era touchstone? Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Neil Young,... all these guys had culturally relevant big sellers long after their initial splash. Isn't half the point that Bon Jovi never again had cultural relevance after New Jersey. Now I'm young-ish, but my impression of all these classic rock dudes is that they fell off for a bit and had a big splash album later, so... that kind of disqualifies them from having a New Jersey at all.

Also, is the fact that Bon Jovi lost all cultural relevance post New Jersey (or is post Nevermind?) central to a New Jersey? Because Talking Heads never really lost that cultural relevance in the same way. Unless there are a bunch of kids out there listening to top 40 hair metal from the 80s and I'm not aware of it...

I like this idea of Pinkertons though... but other than maybe VU & Nico I can't think of anything that would match that trajectory.

Because Talking Heads never really lost that cultural relevance in the same way.

Not in the same way but they sure did. The nineties were hard for a Heads fan. Chris Frantz was moaning in '99 that the band sold few records in catalog and the band left no heirs.

Things changed in 2002, of course.

Yeah but... 2002 DID happen. Bon Jovi never got a similar chance and I don't see it happening. Also, growing up in the 90s I KNEW Bon Jovi wasn't cool, but somehow Talking Heads seemed cool. And I never owned a Talking Heads album back then, but my first CD was Slippery When Wet (my friend had New Jersey on cassette).

yeah i'm trying to think of a blatantly obvious album that was accepted at glorious that the air has dropped out of - I'm thinking Little Creatures but I bet some people will get sandy vadge about that

― da croupier, Monday, August 13, 2012 7:40 PM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark

sand in the vadge: popular favorites

Kate Bush The Dreaming? i mean it was her biggest charting album up to that point.

it didn't sell well, it's an excellent record, and the followup was huge