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

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

An old one, but Deep Purple's Who Do We Think We Are? The follow-up to the perennially selling Machine Head, which was still in the charts when WDWTWR dropped, and the combined sales of those two platters plus Made In Japan, er, made Deep Purple the top-selling artist in America in 1973.

However it ultimately only went Gold, and spun off a single radio staple in "Woman From Tokyo". Things are skewed a bit due to the lineup change afterwards. Burn was about as successful, but became a stronger catalogue item in the long run. The following two albums sold progressively wrose and then they broke up.

Nah, when it comes to 80s/90s Disney Afternoon cartoons, I'd say it's Goof Troop.

Bee Gees totally Jerseyed it with Spirits Having Flown

For such a supposedly popular artist, it's amazing that I've never heard a single note of this Drake fellow's music in my life. Is he any good? Music is so weird and fragmented now.

― Mr. Snrub, Saturday, November 26, 2016 2:48 PM (three years ago) bookmarkflaglink

LOL, “fellow”? Really? Anyway, the streak continues. But I do remember seeing him at those Toronto Raptors games recently.

listening to Vitology by Pearl Jam and this is totally a New Jersey

Mighty Like a Rose is definitely a New Jersey.

Wasn’t Pearl Jam’s career trajectory a straight line down from Ten where each subsequent album was less popular than the one before?

Mighty Like a Rose is definitely a New Jersey.

― Hereward the Woke (Ye Mad Puffin),

he's had several, or at least he's too subcultural for NJs to matter

Didn't Pearl Jam kind of intentionally seek a lower profile after VS by writing less commercial music? And attacking Ticketmaster so they couldn't tour and not building on momentum?

It's a NJ in that the mainstream definitely recoiled a bit from Vitalogy. people loved "Better Man", but despite being nominated for a Grammy, I didn't know anybody who gaf about "Spin the Black Circle" or "Tremor Christ" more than a month after release. Or anybody who is a mega PJ fan who cares about them now.

Buuut critics and the devoted PJ fans were definitely warmer to Vitalogy. Lots of setlist staples from that one. Some say it's their fav!

I guess it fits though, as far as hype goes, it definitely felt like the last PJ album mainstream rock fans anticipated, and you could feel the "who cares" vibe when MTV was trying to help promote No Code.

Last time I heard Vitalogy I was actually surprised by how un-New Jersey it sounded. I also recall about half of the album received heavy to medium FM rotation.

I love No Code and Yield but one of these would make a lot more sense imo.

I feel like Yield was after the sheen had worn off. "Given to Fly" and "In Hiding" got radio play but excitement about them was muted, other than people whining that G2F was a "Going to California" jack.

Re: No Code, I remember learning about its existence from an $11.98 sale in a K-Mart flier.

as opposed to the massive FM leaks of various Vitalogy cuts in the weeks leading up to its release.

MTV was doing a "man on the street" segment where they gave fans a copy of the album and everybody's reaction was "yeah cool pretty good" but not like the fervor around the first two.

"Hail Hail" was a big thud of a single. Then again I remember "I Got Id" from Merkin Ball was pretty big

For No Code.

No Code and Yield are their best albums but for some reason I never listened to Binaural and hardly gave PJ a chance again after that

Vitalogy i always remember as being released first on vinyl:

The album was first released on vinyl, followed by a release on CD and cassette two weeks later on December 6, 1994. The LP sold 34,000 copies in its first week of release, and until Jack White's 2014 album Lazaretto it held the record for most vinyl sales in one week since SoundScan began tracking sales in 1991.

Lazaretto, really

I fucking forgot all about Binaural.

it kind of sucked though.

i decided to give Binaural a listen recently, it's a pretty good slab of rock music, not nearly as catchy as their earlier work but still good enough. i'm willing to forgive PJ for a lot of their music crimes tho i think it might be regarded as their worst?

Vitalogy suffers from the same disease as Druqks: a chocolate box of assorted styles, except there are only three of those styles and they jar up against each other. in the case of Vitalogy it's hoary rockers, plaintive ballads and weird experiments, sequenced in a way that feels like you're listening to three different albums on shuffle

i like that tho

Vitalogy is NOT a NJ in that it's not an Afterburner or Fore! -- it deliberately WANTS to shed fans.

Also maybe I am misreading its legacy but it feels like one of the core Pearl Jam albums and admirably risky instead of being a disappointing bland behemoth

exactly -- Pearl Jam don't belong in this thread

PJ have worked on undercutting their popularity since at least 1994

Vitalogy is NOT a NJ in that it's not an Afterburner or Fore! -- it deliberately WANTS to shed fans.

Bingo. Also Vitalogy has, afaik, one of their biggest songs, Corduroy (fans and live, not charts).

I bet Pearl Jam would do an awesome "Bad Medicine."

Xpost yea they opened with Corduroy first time i saw them

Didn't know Corduroy was so loved. I like it but always heard it as a deep cut

just made a long Spotify playlist of my fave Pearl Jam songs and Yield was the only album where I couldn't miss any of the tracks, to my surprise. I like them all.

I want to say every Pearl Jam album has a bunch of beloved songs that are always in circulation in their sets. While I admit I don't entirely grasp the "New Jersey" concept, I do agree that Pearl Jam intentionally downsized their appeal, or tried to, by not making videos, by trying to go around Ticketmaster, by making more aggressive, or weirder, or less explicitly commercial music (which often got played anyway), and so on. If anything Pearl Jam is in the category of bands whose debut albums were so huge it's more or less fueled their entire career. Talk about live staples, it's remarkable the galvanizing impact all those early songs still have on a PJ set.

they have a bunch of Christmas songs up on Spotify at the moment btw

PJ is one of the few bands for whom their entire catalog is of equal worth; they've disowned nothing. You're as likely to hear "Lukin" or "Pilate" as you are "Alive" or "Wishlist." It's not like when the Stones debut, say, "Worried About You" or dust off "She Was Hot."