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

skimming through the history of #1 albums in the US and here are some potentials we arguably missed.

Styx - Paradise Theater. 3x platinum. Only #1 album, had two top ten hits and neither are "come sail away" or "babe". next, Kilroy Was here (mentioned earlier in the thread), had hits but only went platinum. someone in their 40s can enlighten because i was told these guys were worse than wings and never had reason to believe otherwise.

Cypress Hill - Black Sunday. 3x platinum, with debut only going 2x platinum. Yes "insane in the brain" but imo barely a patch on the debut and def sign

Wu-Tang Clan - Wu Tang Forever - granted, a 2cd going 4x platinum means they actually shipped around half that, but still.

Korn - Issues. Last multiplatinum, and had two top ten alternative radio hits where Follow had only one. I sure don't recall "Falling Away From Me" and "Make Me Bad" as fondly as I do "Freak On A Leash" and "Got The Life" but maybe someone 4 years younger than me can school this.

Two factoids about not-quite-new-jersiers I discovered during this sift.
1) Did you know BOTH big All-4-One songs were covers of songs originally done by John Michael Montgomery?
2) Kenny G's first christmas album from 1994 (8x platinum) is named Miracles: The Holiday Album. His second, from 1999 (3x platinum) is named Faith: A Holiday Album.

Wow, Issues, I think I always thought "Falling Away From Me" was from the same album as "Freak On A Leash" - it was just all part of the lotta-Korn-on-the-radio wave. That seems New Jersey-ish.

Wu-Tang Forever probably counts although its fans love it, a lot. But event-wise, it was more the centerpiece of the suddenly gigantic Wu empire than the album itself, y'know? It's the Avengers movie, not Iron Man 3 or Thor 2 or whatever.

hahahaha re: Kenny G

one thing i will give Korn is that they haven't let commercial decline slow them down one bit. that dubstep album last year was their sixth studio album since Issues, no major label rock band churns 'em out like them.

someone in their 40s can enlighten because i was told these guys were worse than wings and never had reason to believe otherwise.

Understatement.

Wu-Tang Forever probably counts although its fans love it, a lot. But event-wise, it was more the centerpiece of the suddenly gigantic Wu empire than the album itself, y'know? It's the Avengers movie, not Iron Man 3 or Thor 2 or whatever.

wu is hard though because i consider all of the work that took place from the release of 36 chambe & all the solos albums to be "wu tang" stuff in general, i think that initial era is all wu tang no matter who's name is on the cover

that said, wu tang forever definitely signalled the end of that era so that bolsters its new jersey credentials

fwiw, I waited in line at midnight outside of a record store to get Wu Tang Forever, if that helps in the "event album" sense

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...

See my post upthread about Bon Jovi's sales, radio play, and tours post-NJ. They are far from having lost all cultural relevance. (They got plenty of new country airplay around the time of their last album.) JBJ even appeared on 30 Rock. "Livin' on a Prayer" was probably one of the most popular songs on the course listening when I taught rock music in Buffalo btw. Karaoke staple at student pub nights etc.

the problem with the avengers movie analogy is that it's actually a sales-peak "reunion" album, which I don't think anyone rates over their first, rather than a "supergroup" debut.

relevance is a weird word for a group like Bon Jovi--yeah, they don't make the cover of Spin anymore, but they'd probably fill a stadium faster than a bill of the last 20 rock bands to get a BNM from p4k.

"It's My Life" is also notable for its line referencing Frank Sinatra: "My heart is like an open highway / Like Frankie said / I did it 'My Way'." Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora apparently had a disagreement over those lines, with Bon Jovi recalling:[3]

I had just come home from making U-571 and I said "Sinatra made 16 movies and toured 'til he was 80. This is my role model". He [Sambora] said, "You can't write that damn lyric. Nobody cares about Frank Sinatra but you." And I wrote it anyway.

Sambora really clinging to his cultural relevance there

Bon Jovi had consistently impressive sales in the 2000s.

yeah once they hit that 2x platinum lower plateau they kept it going

I mean, I'm looking at the sales of Crush, Have a Nice Day, and Lost Highway and – wow, what a plateau.

and I always forget what a touchstone they are in England

in the 90s they still had videos on MTV "gimme something for the BLUES!" then came "It's My Life" and then their subtle shift towards country...only real misstep was his Destination Anywhere album in the late '90s but that was really an indulgence slapped onto an audition reel mini-movie co-starring Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg that I remember catching on VH1.

numbers have diminished a bit in the last decade, but not at a rate any more precipitous than the music industry itself.

while definitely a cheesy cross between roots-rock and hard rock, they've served up that cheese consistently without demanding the audience respect them or anything.

Their song "Who Says You Can't Go Home" has been omnipresent on Country radio stations for 6 years, though I doubt many of us have heard it.

Why would you doubt that?

I've heard it: it sounds like Johnny Cougar.

by "us" i mean ilm, which is collectively not all that into country radio

Yeah, I don't go out of my way to listen to country radio but that song was everywhere.

seriously dying at richie sambora worrying that "like frankie said i did it my way" was too esoteric

Continuum, maybe a contender?

I forgot the version of the song in this video was actually slightly different from the studio version of the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahf2B_eZUc4

Here's one: Nelly - Sweat/Suit

It's less that Bon Jovi had a big career decline and more that Slippery When Wet was so monumentally huge that it couldn't be repeated.

thought of one that nobody had mentioned: As I Am by Alicia Keys was her last triple platinum album, the next one sold half as much, and the only song anyone remembers from it is "No One," which isn't as highly regarded as several hits from her first 2 albums.

ha, "no one" was her first hit that i liked.

i dunno about "regard" but it looks like "No One" outsold all the previous singles by a wide margin, and "half as much" drop-offs seem less meaningful after 2006, when like, the industry's in freefall.

any successful single will have higher sales figures in 2007 than any successful single from 2001-2004. "Fallin'" would've been multi-platinum too if it came out in the iTunes boom years.

also As I Am sold three million in 2007-2008, after album sales started to drop off big time. when The Element of Freedom (lol) sold half as much 2 years later it was because of lack of pop hits/audience enthusiasm, not the sales climate.

Wasn't "Try sleeping with a broken heart" a big hit and isn't it her best song? (it is imo)

There were three top 10 hits off that album in the UK fwiw.

it's hilarious that "Doesn't Mean Anything" and the Jay-Z-less version of "Empire State of Mind" were huge in the UK (while the album's biggest US hit, "Un-Thinkable," didn't even chart there!)

"No One" is probably her biggest hit, technically speaking. And at this point I hear it way more than even "Fallin'," in coffee shops and grocery stores and such. Not unwelcome either, I really like that track. Not sure that invalidates the parent album as a New Jersey, but yeah, the goofy industry at this point probably moves the goalposts. We may have to revisit this thread in a systematic way ten years from now with "Every huge artist post-2003 has a 'Born This Way'..."

The next Drake album is almost certainly going to be a New Jersey

only in the sense that he resembles a Jersey Shore cast member

Every huge Drake has their 'every Drake album' - a huge event album that immediately feels a bit hollow and signals a career monotone

::croons over muffled drums about how hollow it all feels::

Manic Street Preachers - This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours

― Gavin, Leeds, Tuesday, 7 August 2012 18:39 (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Actually, for MSP I'd suggest Know Your Enemy is that album. It's notable as being the Manics last really hyped "event" album, but also arrived with the nagging feeling they were becoming exhausted as a cultural force - which they went on to prove by following it up with the disappointingly insipid Lifeblood. Due to the gimmick of releasing two lead singles simultaneously, KNE had two number ones in the same week, "So Why So Sad" & "Found That Soul". But who remembers those now? Or "Let Robeson Sing", for that matter?

Lifeblood is so much better than This Is My Truth, Kill Your Enemy and the other two non-Richey lyrics late period albums

Solitude Sometimes Is is the songs they should have released as a single. It's truly great.

Sound Loaded is the sixth album by the Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin, released by Columbia Records on November 14, 2000. The album has been credited with worldwide sales of over eight million copies and went Multi-Platinum in the United States and several other territories. This album is Martin's fourth marketed in the US, and is his second album in English. It includes the hit singles "She Bangs" and "Nobody Wants to Be Lonely".

(of course, it may still be seen as a Big Deal outside the anglophone world; perhaps it's a Slippery in Puerto Rico and a Fairweather Johnson in the States?)

I felt this way about "And Justice For All" at the time it came out.
I still feel that way and I don't care about how The Black Album was huge.

And Justice For All was twice as good as Master of Puppets.

The only thing it doesn't have is something that can compare to "Orion", which itself is three or four times more luminous than anything else in their catalog.

no way is AJFA a New Jersey.

Cliff's death makesit kinda hard to judge