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

actually, now that i wrote that, i'm not sure if i even agree with the "transcending its time" thing. ABBA songs are very 70s but they will be with us forever. hmm.... i still think JT's solo stuff with last longer.

*will last longer (than n sync songs)

I don't understand your argument "Of its time" is not a value judgment, it's a fact. Every song is of its time. There's no platonic ideal.

I don't know if you've ever read any conversations on here re. the subject, but it's certainly been discussed to a certain extent. Criticizing something on the basis of it being "dated" is something I don't understand.

xp

xxxxxxxpost I'm speaking purely in these purely data driven Chris Monsanto terms. People were aware of JT because of the N Sync albums, and they sold a shit ton.

to alfred & timellison: i agree with you guys actually, for the most part, that's why i backpedaled. i think certain sounds/styles are more resilient than others though. the production on "infidels" for instance, sounds like an unfortunate fad today, while none of dylan's 60s albums sound like that. i think n'sync's songs are appealing from a nostalgia perspective more than a musical perspective -- JT's best solo material is stronger, imo. this might be a factor of my age though. i'm 23 and a lot of people i know play backstreet boys and n'sync the same way they do disney music: as a reminder of childhood.

I dunno. Dylan's sixties albums...sound like sixties albums. I don't know why you hold up "sound" as a virtue or blemsih.

I don't know if I would go that far, Alfred. I mean, there are certain guitar sounds that I'm not crazy about, etc.

I'm guess I'm open someone doing something cool with them, though.

The relative success of N'Sync is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether 20/20 will eventually be evidence of the AC/DC rule - the point is just that 20/20's massive first week sales say more about the popularity of the last album than the new album's quality. One could arguably have more than one example of an "AC/DC rule" album in their career if they last long enough to have comebacks.

Taste - including record production styles - really is cyclical; a lot of records that sounded "dated" in the 90s don't now. A lot of old sounds eventually come back into vogue. On the other hand, bubblegum is designed to have a limited shelf-life regardless of its quality; if "Justified" sells 20 times more copies than "No Strings Attached" a decade down the line - and this is still gonna be the case in another 10 years if records still sell at all, trust me - that's as much because Timberlake has assumed the mantle of Real Adult Artist as it is due to anything in the music itself.

N'Sync's Celebrity - which sold half of what No Strings Attached did - almost qualifies as an "AC/DC rule" album, as it was the 2nd biggest first week seller in history at the time...except No Strings Attached was the only one that ever sold more.

imo the big distinction that hasn't really been noted is that the 'New Jersey' concept is kind of about the overall career arc and there being some permanent downward turn from that point onward -- the 'AC/DC rule' is just about whether one particular album is selling well on the strength of its predecessor, nothing to say there's a permanent dropoff or whether there's a rebound later etc.

bubblegum is designed to have a limited shelf-life regardless of its quality

Totally disagree. And it's striking to me how a record like "I Want You Back" still sounds like one of the freshest records from 1969.

imo the big distinction that hasn't really been noted is that the 'New Jersey' concept is kind of about the overall career arc and there being some permanent downward turn from that point onward -- the 'AC/DC rule' is just about whether one particular album is selling well on the strength of its predecessor, nothing to say there's a permanent dropoff or whether there's a rebound later etc.

this is the big reason I rankled at including Rattle & Hum in the New Jersey poll, as How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, following ATYCLB and followed by No Line On The Horizon, is a more obvious NJ than the album that came between Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby.

though really U2 are such fucking cockroaches that they may rise again

kiss's New Jersey: the four solo albums?

¡Catorce! will be the biggest album released next year (xp)

KISS' sales are maddeningly consistent and for the pre-Soundscan albums wildly inflated too.

Simmons's memoir open about chart manipulation.

(yes, I read the portion of it up until the photo of Ace making out with their manager)

XP to timellison - I'm not even talking about the music - I mean the way it's marketed, talked about, etc. You and I and most people on this board know that there's nothing that says teenpop can't be great art. But we've been conditioned to think otherwise. I don't think most of those records stop getting played on the radio entirely after 2 or 3 years because they're bad, or even because people don't want to hear them anymore, but because there's a vested industry interest in making them obsolete. If "I Want You Back" were simply great as opposed to transcendent we probably wouldn't hear it anymore. Whereas there are a lot of mediocre or worse rock records from that era that still get serious airtime.

kiss's New Jersey: the four solo albums?

kiss was never huge enough to really get a new jersey - only destroyer's even been certified double platinum - but Dynasty, the follow-up to the solos, still went platinum and charted higher than any of the 4.

XP RE Kiss - I'm pretty sure the RIAA changed certification rules because execs like Neil Bogart, head of Casablanca Records (Kiss's label) gamed the system so blatantly. Those four solo albums were only the most notorious example.

xpost to alfred, again, to clarify something: i don't believe in anything like "timelessness." i was just being sloppy in my description of why i thought "cry me a river" provided a deeper, more fulfilling kind of pleasure than bye bye bye, which feels "thinner" and so, because it is 15 or so years old, "obsolete" in a way that great pop songs -- no matter how "of their time" they are, that's not the issue all -- never do.

here's timelessness. It's played all the time in Australia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7fxN3g5sLw

sweet.

kiss was never huge enough to really get a new jersey - only destroyer's even been certified double platinum

piss. alive ii went dbl platinum, while alive, rock n roll over and love gun went single. they were fuckin huge for a while there.

If "I Want You Back" were simply great as opposed to transcendent we probably wouldn't hear it anymore. Whereas there are a lot of mediocre or worse rock records from that era that still get serious airtime.

Not sure about that - I've certainly heard, say, "Band of Gold" or "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" on the radio a lot over the years.

piss. alive ii went dbl platinum, while alive, rock n roll over and love gun went single. they were fuckin huge for a while there.

piss yourself. we're talking about blockbusters - and kiss only has like one or two albums that haven't gone gold - so it's not like they had a big album that was hollow in hindsight considering the drop that followed. Big reason we had a 3xplatinum minimum when doing the poll.

i'm just saying they were huge, supposedly the most popular band in america at the time of love gun's release. that thing went platinum almost immediately on release, was the event album of its moment and a huge off the bat success. not saying it was their nj, but the reason they didn't really have one was that they only slowly lost the "hottest band in the world" steam they picked up from destroyer and alive ii, over the course of three proper albums (rock & roll over, love gun and dynasty) and four solo projects.

i know they had earned that "most popular band in america" title in some poll, but they also only had one album ever in the top 5.

haha until psycho circus, that is

though admitted it's a little hard to gauge 70s stuff when most multi-platinum certifications didn't come until the 80s - though for instance, Bob Seger has three albums that have gone 5x platinum or more.

yeah Kiss's big commercial accomplishment is to have milked what actually wasn't an especially impressive fanbase for every penny it was worth

for a couple summers there in '76 and '77 they were massive. maybe mostly among teenage boys, but those fuckers get rabid. (tbh, my perspective may be somewhat distorted by my membership in that group at the time.)

well kiss's New Jersey "moment" in terms of cultural cachet was def. 78-79, maybe starting with Alive 2 and culminating in Unmasked. I guess that's a pretty long moment.

But yeah the sales manipulation thing + their rep as live act vs album artist throws a wrench in the works.

xp yeah, i guess i did mean '77/'78 through '79 or so, things get fuzzy. hell i wasn't even a proper teen until 1980, so my facts clearly need sorting.

in general one's better off checking wikipedia when considering an album for NJ status and not relying on thoughts like "man all my friends in high school had that album but i thought it sucked"

saves the chart nerds from having to explain that Pavement never went gold etc

KISS blows mostly

also the solo albums cannot be a New Jersey because i'm sure ppl even then were like these things fucking suck ass except for New York Groove and a big part of a New Jersey is the perception as a strong album at launch.

in that case what's toad the wet sprocket's NJ xxp

Dulcinea

yeah the idea of the 4 kiss solo albums... Like, DUH, OF COURSE it failed, wtf were they thinking? I agree that Kiss is sorta disqualified due to all the stuff you guys mentioned. the 4 solo thing was such a ridiculous overreach, though, kind of unique. But yeah Kiss is basically a comic book so the usual rules of releasing albums (ex: don't release 4 solo albums simultaneously) don't apply so cleanly.

i'm sure ppl even then were like these things fucking suck ass except for New York Groove

ace has some other jams. rip it out, snowblind, uh...

KISS; the Donald Trump of Rock!

i think n'sync's songs are appealing from a nostalgia perspective more than a musical perspective -- JT's best solo material is stronger, imo. this might be a factor of my age though. i'm 23 and a lot of people i know play backstreet boys and n'sync the same way they do disney music: as a reminder of childhood.

― Pat Finn, Sunday, April 14, 2013 10:07 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think this might be reformulated just in terms of when the artists peaked relative to their fans' relationships to music - - - N*Sync sold a bazillion records to 8-16-year-olds, JT solo sold a bazillion records to 13-21-year-olds (often, but not always the same people) (generalizing wildly here about all this), and I think that makes a difference in terms of what people, later in life, are likely to put in "best of" lists, regardless of how much they actually might still enjoy or relate to the music.

That is, when you're 40 and editing a popular-press webzone, you might still jam to "Pop" but unless you have really absorbed the poptimist critique the tendency is going to be to use that album for the "chuckle, here's 10 guilty pleasures" article, Justified for the "hey, shocker, this still holds up!" article, and FS/LS to actually go on the Best Albums Of The 2000s countdown. Some of that's rockism and art-historical teleology talking ("mature work," "addresses adult themes," "darker"), but it's also I think that people are more willing to frame the music they danced to in college as Actually Good versus the music they danced to in middle school as You Had To Be There, or Secretly Good, or whatever.

But this is all just me writing a general theory around the case of Justin Timberlake, since I graduated high school in 2000 and associate "Rock Your Body" with grown-up partying and actual up-close-dancing with a girl named Jamie who was the hottest thing in my world at that moment, and for about forty-five seconds of my life feeling like a competent, smooth flirt who was hitting the right moves at the right movement and pulling off the eye contact and everything.

And then "I Like The Way You Move" came on and I couldn't find the rhythm and the moment passed, but damn, do I still dig both those songs.

did you have her naked by the end of that song?

never, never.