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

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."

actually the deliberately shedding fans is a grunge era pathology i didn't really think about

however,

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

― Mazzy Tsar (PBKR), Tuesday, December 10, 2019 7:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

again, Corduroy being a big song does NOT disqualify it, in fact I think a New Jersey has to have some big hits or it would be a Fairweather Johnson

Bon Jovi still does a bunch of New Jersey in its live sets

https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/bon-jovi/2019/estadio-nacional-lima-peru-439c7ff7.html

also not really relevant but DAMN Vitology is more of a slog than I remembered

yeah dog latin otm about the sequencing. but that also helped it feel like a big box of goodies, along with the packaging i think. it's going for "white album" maybe - it just doesn't quite have the sonic variety to match, versus something like Mellon Collie where you really get different sounds or even different genres as you go on the journey. whereas Vitalogy is maybe four cut songs away from being a very strong "Vs. II." the choice to not do that makes the world more interesting. and also makes it have less of a New Jersey "feel," vis-a-vis conscious shedding of superstardom, even tho i agree that it ticks several other boxes.

"better man" still has life on radio stations that play grunge hits. idk can't see vitalogy as a nj at all

although i guess that's a point in its favor

NJ had five top tens including two #1's and except for "Bad Medicine" they've all vanished from the face of the earth

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, August 7, 2012 11:55 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree that PJ does not belong on this thread

Bon Jovi sucks, but I was curious and looked up the track list of New Jersey, and there are three songs off that I could hum. The rest I don't recognize by title, but three is not bad!

I just came across a recent interview with Desmond Child, who co-wrote "Livin' on a Prayer" (among others). He says last year it got streamed half a billion times, and that netted him all of $6,000. My question is, where is my cut for hearing it so many times?

Does he get a cut of karaoke licenses, though?

That is a fucking pittance. Songwriters and musicians really need to go on strike like back in ‘42.

I just came across a recent interview with Desmond Child, who co-wrote "Livin' on a Prayer" (among others).

I mean, Bad Medicine for one!

There's one song on "New Jersey" co-written by Child *and* Diane Warren! Talk about hedging your bets.

Any band that ever co-wrote with Child should have their instruments destroyed

Aerosmith

"Heart's Done Time"
"Dude (Looks Like a Lady)"
"Angel"
"What It Takes"
"Flesh"
"Crazy"
"Hole in My Soul"
"Ain't That a Bitch"

That is DIRE

pretty bummed that i can still more or less remember how those Nine Lives deep cuts go