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

The sentiments on both are revolting, let's be clear.

okay wtf is happening here

Find a Desmond Child song written for a Disney Channel-bred pop star and ILM will be sucked into a bottomless vortex of popist ecstasy.

that's an inaccurate description of Alice Cooper

That same clip I posted bounces to another clip where he talks about working with Hansen. He gave Diane Warren a call for advice and she made fun of him for working with a bunch of nine-year-olds. Then after that album got huge she apparently called him back and asked for their number.

Bell Biv Devoe "Poison" >>> Alice Cooper "Poison"

https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/fZgi5

poison house mix

Alice Cooper "Poison" rules.

Poison the band is doodoo.

I drank poison earlier.

I-

Alice Cooper "Poison" which is the same metaphor as "Bad Medicine" and it's a much better song.

Is the poison also the chains that he doesn't want to break or...? Does he want to hurt the venomous poison just to hear it calling his name...?

Miami's Poison Clan and Uncle Luke with one of the lesser known Dre/Snoop diss records

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3T7z9Iayx4

in all seriousness though I thought Bad Medicine was this meaning as opposed to drug metaphor: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bad_medicine

I got bad medicine, I got the remedy

sorry it's a permanent disease

Pre-chorus seems to spell it out

"Edison's Medicine" > "Bad Medicine"

The all-night generator is admittedly a little confusing.

search for 'bad medicine terrible song'

About 20,700,000 results (0.91 seconds)

POISON - NOTHIN BUT A GOOD TIME- JUST BLAZE REMIX!!!!

lol Poison house mix is dope

So here's an album that just popped into my head that might qualify as a New Jersey, depending on whether or not you consider it a step down from it's predecessor: TV on the Radio's Dear Science.
It was a big commercial and critical success, surpassing "Return to Cookie Mountain", but I feel like it's kind of forgotten in the grand scheme of things, with the singles from that album not even being in their Top 5 on Spotify. But then again, this also just might be the result of TV on The Radio in general being kind of forgotten.

We have different working definitions of "huge event album."

― Eric H., Tuesday, August 7, 2012 10:45 AM (eight years ago)

the next New Jersey will probably be made by Bad Bunny and we won't even know it

Bad Bunny covering "Bad Medicine"

I reread this three times before I realized you weren't talking about Bunnybrains.

Live: Secret Samadhi?

#onethread

The whole Don’t Look Back vs Third Stage ambiguity could have been avoided if Boston would've had the courtesy to make DLB their debut album. Then it would have lined up perfectly!

this is weird cause i've listened to DLB twice in the past couple days and was thinking abt the recent discussion of "1976" in classic rock and how it's easy to forget that Boston had a second album that was also quite successful, and enjoyable, yet simultaneously somehow not really necessary to their legacy/narrative. i guess YMMV based on how much the title track showed up in your local classic rock radio station's playlists.

I always thought of those first two Bostons as being one big album. Checking the tracklisting for DLB, the title cut is the only track I heard regularly on the radio, with "A Man I'll Never Be" and "Party" popping up less frequently.

That's right, making the DLB disappearance even more odd (it totally follows the NJ-staple "more of the same", especially "Feelin' Satisfied" repeating the "Peace of Mind" compositional technique where everything drops out, then the song re-builds).

DLB is hurt by one thing, though: unlike its predecessor, none of its songs were featured in those hilariously-bonkers "social guidance" films shown to classrooms from like '83 through '90 (even on a garbage mono cassette player where you had to wait until the film told you to press the super-heavy play button, "Smokin'" sounded absolutely massive).

woah wait did Boston have a strong presence in such films??

They probably were referenced in a few, but I mostly recall one widely-distributed film aimed at the pre-teen audience that featured Kim Fields from "The Facts of Life", as well as some older dude narrator (with that early-'80s-commercial voice) warning us about rock and roll's "secret messages" that promoted drugs and alcohol. The music section featured multiple vignettes, each beginning with a still shot of a record's center, so you could see the album title and artist - talk about a lucrative placement! - then they played 30ish seconds from the song with the lyrics transcribed for extra emphasis. The only 3 songs I remember were 2 different "Cocaine"s (Eric Clapton, then Jackson Browne), and Boston's "Smokin'", which got an extra-long feature for some reason. A classmate told us that his older sister had that Boston album on cassette, so that became a regular feature at neighborhood get-togethers and birthday parties, and by the time we got to 6th grade and they played that film for us again, several of us were singing along with "Smokin'", much to the teacher's chagrin.

wow, thanks for filling that in. and lol at the end. they should have used "Party" though, what with the toke reference and the devil-may-care attitude.

Don't Look Back continues to provide a rockin' soundtrack to the long weekend... it's definitely a little short on material and some songs are distractingly underwritten or obvious clones of specific tracks from the debut. it's fair, if they didn't have Third Stage there would surely be no debate about it qualifying as a NJ. but... whatever! the first Boston record is a good template to copy! apart from the monumental title track i think "Don't Be Afraid" is the standout.

i think i've posted about this before, but this band had such a unique combination... hippie life-coach lyrics blown up to pyrotechnic scale. and even like "Don't Be Afraid" --- taken literally, just a pick-up line song, but i can't help but hearing Delp shrieking his heart out about accepting the cosmic force of capital-L Love, as in The Summer Of. the downside is that the tracks actually going for anthems of thoughtful reflection can come off as quite dopey and elementary - nothing here on the level of "Peace of Mind."

distractingly underwritten

now with a couple more years of hindsight, “Views”, “Lemonade”, “Life Of Pablo”, “Prism”, “Hard Candy” and “1989” are surely all textbook NJ’s for the artists that were huge circa 2010?

Reputation was a big hit album too.

(i.e., I don’t agree w/the 1989 cite.)

1989 is easily her biggest album, no way it's a new jersey

The jury's out until there's a follow-up, but Adele's 25 could be a contender.

Adele 56: when

Surely Music was Madonna's New Jersey, despite Confessions on a Dance Floor?

Music even made Rolling Stone's top 500 of all time list in 2003, which was bizarre then and unthinkable now.

From a UK perspective Music is her comeback after a relatively quiet mid-90s

“Reputation” was still a hit yes, but so was “Keep The Faith”, but in both cases the cultural moment was kinda already over?

And “Hard Candy” since it still had hits (“4 Minutes”), but the “hollow feeling that the gig was up” is definitively there and the dropoff was at that point irreversible. “Music” doesn’t feel like that at all to me?

Do you think Taylor’s “cultural moment” has passed in any way analogous to Bon Jovi’s, 6.5 years after New Jersey? If so, you are mistaken.

morrisp otm

From A US perspective, I'd argue that most of these albums are far from being surefire NJs. Prism is maybe the closest, but its certification of 2x platinum in the US is nowhere near the 8x that Teenage Dream did, so, disqualified?

1989 - I'd echo what others have said.

Views - Drake has had loads of number ones since then (including 4 of them in 2018, two years after Views' release). Also, his follow-up to Views is certified 5x platinum in the states vs 6x for Views. Seems fairly relevant to me.

Hard Candy - Both this and Confessions each only had one hit in the US. Confessions did nice business compared to American Life, but (in the US at least) ain't a Slippery When Wet blockbuster. Even if it was, Hard Candy did appreciably worse than Confessions, so, this doesn't feel very NJ to me.

I feel like Life of Pablo and Lemonade could be interesting discussions re: where these artists are at in their careers, but I'm not sure anybody would suggest that either are in a struggle for relevancy (pop hits, maybe... relevancy, no).

Perhaps NJ is a particular failure of blow jovi

Oh no, there are plenty of NJs. These just ain’t them!

Taylor is obviously still relevant to her old fans, but at this point she’s become near invisible if you’re either younger or older, the days where “Shake It Off” was in a movie like Sing and other mass media and you couldn’t escape her music in stores, radio, albums are an “event” etc are long gone.

For what it’s worth, Google Trends