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

I agree that nothing should be labelled a New Jersey until its follow-up is out.

Yeah without a follow-up, it's hard to tell if an album is a NJ or not.
As for FOTB, it's far from being ma favourite of theirs (VW/MVOTC first, depending on the mood, then FOTB then Contra) but it's very good and it seems it's quite popular and most of the VW fans love it so it doesn't feel like a NJ to me.

yeah, i think for many people this is their favorite release of theirs. On top of that, they're trying a bunch of new things on it, so I don't really see it as the creative stagnation coasting on momentum that for me NJs have been about.

y'all watch

Might be too early to say, but I feel like reputation will ultimately be a New Jersey.

― triggercut, Wednesday, August 29, 2018 6:39 AM (nine months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hmm

not a bad prediction

Tonight when my daughter wasn't coming up from the basement to get ready for bed, I blasted "Bad Medicine" to flush her out.

You = cool dad

I 100% stand by my Culture II vote for New Jersey status. Follow-up or no.

Yeah Culture II might be a good one. But was it big enough, though ?
Or just the second album of a band/artist that had a big first album and then (more or less) vanished ?
Maybe a NJ requires a more established act than one like Migos.

it didn't have anything as big as "bad and boujee" but it felt just as big as its forerunner if not bigger? like if you tallied up streams and spins and all that shit i wouldn't be surprised if it actually outdid culture

even suggesting that migos 'vanished' after culture is absolutely preposterous

like, are you all misremembering culture as being significantly bigger than it actually was? i just am not understanding the disconnect here

if you tallied up streams and spins and all that shit i wouldn't be surprised if it actually outdid culture

Cause it has twice as many tracks.

if we're setting arbitrary rules for what is and is not a new jersey then "all/most of the members immediately pursued solo projects in lieu of making the next album" would seem to be a good disqualifier

didn't Jon Bon Jovi release a solo album after New Jersey?

(with that "wanted dead or alive" song)

it’s extremely balsy to break from the band NAMED AFTER YOURSELF for a solo project

Silverfish gets it. The same swaggering hubris that creates a NJ also enables substandard solo lps.

dyl - I'm agreeing with you that Culture II was just as big or bigger than Culture (just like a New Jersey!), but, their solo records that followed flopped (worse than Jon Bon Jovi's that followed NJ) and there's zero sense of event about a Migos release or solo feature at this point. If their next album does HALF the numbers that Culture II did, it'll be a real surprise and victory for them.

"Position to Win" didn't even hit 5 mill plays on Spotify! An act on top of their game does that in their sleep.

none of the solo migos records have ever done particularly well

Cause it has twice as many tracks.

the relationship between the number of tracks and the amount of streams a project gets over the course of its commercial life has been vastly exaggerated by 'death of the album'-type coverage. the effect, when it does exist, is concentrated on the first week the record comes out, when more die-hards are listening. even if you restrict your focus to the biggest 3 or 4 tracks from each, culture ii is easily on the same level as culture

there's zero sense of event about a Migos release

i will concede that this is somewhat true, altho i wouldn't go as far as to say 'zero'

idk for me a new jersey is an album that lands with a big splash but does well but ultimately fails to have the kind of legs the predecessor(s) did and gives one the sense that the act will never quite reach those heights again. even if the artist's cultural footprint seems to have weakened somewhat, an album that does basically the same numbers as the predecessor doesn't really fit the bill imo! tswift's reputation and paula abdul's spellbound are new jerseys -- culture ii is not.

This thread is so mammoth, it’s interesting to pick a search term like “Monster” or “Eminem,” and track it all the way thru.

I think the truer definition of NJ is that the New Jersey 100% does the business (or very close to it) that its predecessor did. Like... New Jersey! haha The come down is when the NEXT album is released.

I'll concede that there isn't ZERO sense of event. Truth. Let's just say that Culture II was eagerly awaited, and the next one is something ppl aren't really thirsty like that for.

I think Bob Dylan’s “Desire” album fits the bill. It came out near the peak of his sales, right after an iconic album, sold well but presaged a big drop on the next album, and has since fallen considerably in critical estimation.

actually, Desire sold even better than BOTT.

So that’s a point in its favor, no?

The problem with Desire as an NJ is that you still hear its singles out & about. Once I heard «  One more cup of coffee » at a Burger King in Shinjuku.

Sorry to derail but:

didn't Jon Bon Jovi release a solo album after New Jersey?

(with that "wanted dead or alive" song)

"Wanted Dead Or Alive" was the third single from Slippery When Wet

(You're thinking of "Blaze of Glory", which was also on the Young Guns II soundtrack)

bob dylan's career is too long and winding for any one album to be considered a NJ

Street-Legal is the only Dylan studio album to go platinum in the UK. Now that would be a Dylan NJ...

Been thinking that, despite "Work It", 'Under Construction' could be Missy's NJ.

I like The Cookbook too much to get on board with that.

Street-Legal broke Dylan's three-album #1 streak in the States but Slow Train Coming went platinum. I guess you can argue his career went downhill until 1997, but Dylan's career doesn't have many mega hits. I think we said up thread that he doesn't qualify for this thread.

right, blaze of glory. I should have looked that up. I'm not really a bon jovi expert, all I know is basically just from hearing my older sister play her bon jovi tapes constantly when I was a kid.

many xps

I'm trying to remember how Blaze of Glory goes and I can remember the chorus pretty well but the rest of the song always turns into Wanted Dead or Alive

Jeff Beck solo

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/abEAAOSw-H1a08kk/s-l1600.jpg

Benmont Tench! Little Richard! Aldo Nova!

Under Construction is a good one. Especially since it sold more than Miss E... So Addictive.
As for Dylan, yeah, he doesn't belong in this thread.

xp: Dr. Scott!

ha, i sat down a couple weeks ago to try and make the Missy case for This Is Not A Test!. but after typing half a paragraph i actually looked at her singles and album sales, and there really wasn't a jump down to The Cookbook... But Under Construction doesn't feel right to me, given how large Work It! still looms in her legend. At the same time, I'd agree that none of her albums after that felt like "events" in the same way.

IMHO she kinda just put them out too fast.... the right call commercially, but in terms of narrative/event status, it was more like a pre-Thriller approach, with a record almost every year and just 2-3 singles for each, and if it's 3, one of them was far less convincing and made basically no cultural impact.

I think the truer definition of NJ is that the New Jersey 100% does the business (or very close to it) that its predecessor did. Like... New Jersey! haha The come down is when the NEXT album is released.

I'll concede that there isn't ZERO sense of event. Truth. Let's just say that Culture II was eagerly awaited, and the next one is something ppl aren't really thirsty like that for.

― mr.raffles, Thursday, June 20, 2019 8:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

solid definition though i think the truest Jersey is the one where the excitement for the album is based on the absurdly successful previous one, and even more ideally the Jersey album has taken *just* a bit too long to come out and there's a sense that time has passed the band by a bit, and that sense is not contradicted by a stunning artistic statement but a very perfunctory by-the-numbers release.

Which is why Def Leppard really Jerseyed it with Adrenalize -- it's such a non-entity as an album that anyone who wasn't there in 1991 or 1992 awaiting its release couldn't possible imagine people were excited for it, but i mean people were super hyped for it. Every dude i knew in high school grabbed a copy. But 1992 was very different from 1987-1988 and there was that sense that the game was up. So even before a Jersey comes out you have that premonition. Though it's also true that some Jerseys are only successfully diagnosed retrospectively. Sometimes very long after the fact.

idk for me a new jersey is an album that lands with a big splash but does well but ultimately fails to have the kind of legs the predecessor(s) did and gives one the sense that the act will never quite reach those heights again. even if the artist's cultural footprint seems to have weakened somewhat, an album that does basically the same numbers as the predecessor doesn't really fit the bill imo! tswift's reputation and paula abdul's spellbound are new jerseys -- culture ii is not.

― dyl, Friday, 21 June 2019 03:27 (fourteen hours ago) Permalink

???? This totally describes culture ii. They got usurped by Lil baby/gunna right after culture ii dropped

The one way culture ii is not a New Jersey is omar’s definition of it taking too long to come out ... they def seemed to rush it out the door to capitalize while they could

But like no one cares about those songs even tho he numbers were solid, “walk it like i talk it” is not a collective memory single like Versace or bad & boujee

or "T-Shirt"

Yup. Thanks, D and Voodoo That’s exactly what I was getting at. They went from being the novel young guns to being slower on their feet elders during the CII campaign. Newer artists had bigger pop hits AND bigger street tracks. Outgunned from all sides.
Also, coming out too late isn’t a NJ feature. NJ came out what, 2-2 1/2 years after Slippery?

The lateness isn’t so much an essential quality as it is an added feature further enhancing the jerseyness.

I'm nostalgic for the two weeks when we were pretending "T-Shirt" was the greatest song of all time to wind up deej

It isn't.

?

i hear "walk it talk it" and "motorsport" and (unfortunately) "stir fry" still with decent regularity but okay i guess if you pronounce that it's not a 'collective memory single' then it's not lol xp

in terms of disney children's animated series, this is TaleSpin