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

yeah Look What You Made Me Do wiki says

The song broke a string of records, including the record for the most plays in a single day on Spotify. Commercially, "Look What You Made Me Do" has topped the charts in Australia, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It has also received Platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, Italy, Sweden and the United States. It also received Diamond certification in Brazil.

but yeah definitely didn't feel like an album that really had legs....

Yeah, Reputation does feel like a NJ.
It seems even TS fans on ilx don't like it/discuss it a lot !

Time will tell, but I wouldn’t bet against her.

1989 fits better, having actual hits

Btw, she’s a “free agent” at the moment, renegotiating her contract w/Big Machine; and part of their calculations around Tay’s demand for ownership of past albums is weighing her potential future success against the value of controlling her old catalog. So they’re trying to peer into the same crystal ball.

so we might have finally found a way to monetize all the time spent on this board into consultancies

Time will tell, but I wouldn’t bet against her.

― stan in the place where you work (morrisp), Wednesday, August 29, 2018 9:37 AM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean, in general, with very rare exceptions it's smarter to bet against a pop star, most careers generally have a trajectory...not that she's going to be like playing small clubs again or anything but the odds of staying a phenomenon are pretty small for the most part

Point taken... but this is probably why I’m not a gambling man, or label head (I’d go with my gut over logic)

Katy Perry's Prism, on the other hand, with a few years' distance...

yeah I see no sign that in 2018 we'll look at 1989 and think, "Wow, here's when we knew the next album was going to be Keep the Faith."

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 10, 2015 6:50 AM (three years ago)

(posting for no reason other than timeliness/relevance to current discussion)

I think Swift's post-megastar career (whenever that kicks off) will probably resemble something like Madonna's or Springsteen's... though she also has the option of scaling back and going "rootsy" again, as an aesthetic strategy (as did Springsteen, in fact).

yeah a "return to country" move forswearing pop and all its empty promises would be a smart move, plus country audiences are more loyal in the long term

Do you think they would "take her back," though? I guess it depends on how she does it...

I could also see her occupying a kind of middle ground -- a mainstream singer-songwriter with appeal across various audiences (rock, adult-oriented pop, country)... a mode that isn't so popular anymore (at least at that level), but maybe she could pull off.

Maybe scratch "country," as I guess you're either in that world, or out of it (i.e., played on country radio, or not); can't think of too many artists who have successfully straddled both rock and country worlds for long.

she won song of the year at the 2017 cmas for something she wrote little big town's 'better man,' i suspect a comeback will be not impossible

Yeah, and she was just involved in this moderate hit for Sugarland:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l25AL0BdD6w

(co-wrote & featured)

oof no I'm wrong, it was the 2nd highest selling global album in 2017
― droit au butt (Euler), Wednesday, August 29, 2018 8:31 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark

New Jersey was the 4th biggest album of 1989. Reputation could still be a New Jersey.

You really can't know if something is a New Jersey until like 7-14 years later.

Wow, Sugarland. I worked selling food/drink at one of their shows in 2010. The most brutal and openly racist crowd I've... ever been in proximity to. Horrible.

I could also see her occupying a kind of middle ground -- a mainstream singer-songwriter with appeal across various audiences (rock, adult-oriented pop, country)... a mode that isn't so popular anymore (at least at that level), but maybe she could pull off.

I mean, there's Pink

“Every seven years, the cicadas shall return; and we shall judge whether another crop of artists has released their New Jersey.”

(xp to bsj)

there are no more new jerseys

if there were we would have to call them newer jerseys

...Or are there now ONLY New Jerseys?

obvious point made elsewhere i'm sure but one of the true New Jersey signs is the fading of the carryover album-to-album enthusiasm that gets the not-rabid fanbase to pick up your album, which is often kind of hard to spot when your rabid fanbase is huge (as Taylor Swift's is currently) and the overall fade is a bit slow and often disguised by other successes.

Like with U2 and their pair of false New Jerseys (Rattle & Hum, POP) which put a temporary dent in their sales (until the more successful actual New Jersey of How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb): Achtung Baby brought them back to cultural relevance and huge sales, but they did lose some numbers between it and The Joshua Tree.

Then they steadily lost more sales until All That You Can't Leave Behind, which was in retrospect less a comeback and more of a "it was nice to see that they can still do that, probably don't really *need* to get the next one though..." And then HTDAAB was a "hit" but powered largely by the fanbase and some stragglers and then it went to the discount bins pretty swiftly. The excitement and the sense that U2 had anything left to say had evaporated after that album.

And that's kind of it, the hardcore fans will always remains and maybe such artists put out a single or two that people will passively enjoy (or not), and they'll still have big tours and sell a decent number of albums, but their moment in the spotlight is gone. often times they embrace it and just do their thing (someone like Bowie did that, Prince too it could be argued) but U2 to this day doesn't recognize that the game is up.

“Every seven years, the cicadas shall return; and we shall judge whether another crop of artists has released their New Jersey.”

It's true.

Re. Pink i don’t even know if she has a thread here, maybe the biggest pop superstar that ilm doesn’t care about? I’ve loved all her recent singles.

Maybe this one has been covered, but Black Keys: El Camino?

re: U2: they can still sell out arenas, right? from their POV 'the game' is probably still just going along about like it's been since pop - they're not the biggest band in the universe but they're big enough that they'll never be small in their lifetimes. of course none of that is mutually exclusive with NJ-dom, just that the "career decline" in the thread premise means different things at different scales of huge-artist-ness.

an anecdotal argument for scorpion's jersey-dom is that i know in my feelings is a huge hit and there's some sort of accompanying challenge but i've managed to somehow avoid ever hearing it whereas one dance and hotline bling were inescapable.

Re. Pink i don’t even know if she has a thread here, maybe the biggest pop superstar that ilm doesn’t care about? I’ve loved all her recent singles.

I like some of her stuff quite a bit and her career longevity is impressive as hell.

I think if you can manage one or more fake out or false New Jerseys then you should be immune to a real New Jersey, like having chicken pox as a kid. I dunno, it just doesn’t feel right to me to call U2’s 11th album a NJ.

^+1

U2 is in a kind of unique cultural space being effectively the Last Classic Rock Band

also "Vertigo" is remembered. saw some punk band cover it last week. people remember "uno, dos, tres, catorce."

It would be geographically a bit droll if Bruce Springsteen's NEW JERSEY was NEBRASKA.

Or even GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J.

Is 'Illinois' Sufjan's indie New Jersey?

Surely not - 'Chicago' is his biggest song? (and I think maybe even still ... his best!)

Again it would be geographically fun if his NEW JERSEY were ... THE BQE.

A lot of people have mentioned The Great Escape, but they had another New Jersey in the shape of 13, which got a huge amount of coverage and hype but was the beginning of Damon writing a lot of meandering, hookless quasi-songs that would come to define his later projects

Great Escape was super popular and had tons of fans - it was one of the records that moved indie/britpop from cult to mainstream status in the UK in the late 90s/early 00s. Many many dreadful records ensued but that Great Escape sound (e.g. Parklife but rockier, sillier and more indulgent) was everywhere for years.

I think Blur are essentially a band for mid-teenagers and each new record coincided with some percentage of their fanbase growing out of them.

Hum. Yeah Great Escape was very popular and had many hits but the idea of the NJ that "the gig is up" is kinda obvious with that one.
It has a end of the party/depressive feeling.

Yes, the point is not these albums were not popular but that they were popular?

I meant, “the gig is up” feeling came from a minority of older fans (self included) but for many more people TGE was the start of something else.

Actually I've just check and you're right, the follow-up to Great Escape, Blur, was their biggest selling album and might then be their NJ !

Not sure how you can say that when "Song 2" is probably their biggest hit?

Like it's in permanent Jock Jam rotation all over the States, at least.

blur doesn’t have a new jersey wtf