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

Hindsight is 20/20 and, in retrospect, Bang! Pow! Boom! was the Insane Clown Posse's very own New Jersey.

surprised Insane Clown Posse has never been mentioned in this thread tbh

I hear their fans are called "Juggalos"

Every huge artist has "Juggalos"

a fanbase that is its own subculture but ultimately feels a bit hollow? i think i can see it

not hollow - filled with faygo

For real, they were a beloved underground unit, one of the horrorcore scene's best kept secrets, and when 'Miracles' dropped, a lot of people hailed their open embrace of pop rap as a quantum leap forward, but thinking back on it now, I think it's pretty obvious that the ensuing memes were a harbinger of the decline.

fucking New Jerseys, how do they work

Cat person? Is that a New Jersey?

I think there's a case to be made for Carrie Underwood's Carnival Ride as a New Jersey. It's hard to imagine, but her debut Some Hearts was the biggest selling album of 2006 in the U.S.--ten million copies sold worldwide and 8x Platinum in the Death-of-the-CD era. And it wasn't due just to American Idol visibility but the megahit "Before He Cheats." She seemed poised not to just be a country star but a crossover pop star.

So in 2008 there was a lot of industry anticipation for her follow-up. And it did...just fine. #1 debut. 4 million sold. A few #1 country hits that made a showing on the pop charts. But it was pretty a standard 2008 Nashville album aimed at country radio and felt pretty much like a retread of the debut, just not quite as good. A lot of pop fans peeled off and each of her successive albums sold about a million less than the last.

Only one of the singles is even in her Spotify top ten (All American Girl, #6) "Last Name" was a bad attempt to duplicate the badass vibe of "Before He Cheats."

But as a career move it was probably a success, as it cemented her as a country performer, not someone who would go pop (like Taylor) and she's still one of the biggest stars in the genre.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2021/09/07/drakes-certified-lover-boy-smashes-spotify-records-as-it-heads-for-biggest-debut-of-2021/?sh=4733b23f508f

After listening to it a few times he may finally have reached his New Jersey !

Was going to say, I think I've incorrectly called the new Drake a New Jersey like 3 times in this thread, but if this isn't one then he's never going to have one

you know what, I finally thought of one - Emotional by Falco. at least in Germany it was. the album hit #1, the singles all did alright, but everything about it was way over the top and strange and his next album sold like...a tenth as many copies

The impending release of 30 will perhaps answer whether or not Adele will join the NJ club.

New Coldplay album definitely feels like a potential NJ

So that would make--let me see here--Everyday Life their SWW?

don't think it really fits, the previous album was their least successful ever bc it was the least pop-oriented thing they'd done in a long time & they made relatively little effort to promote it. this new one has given them their biggest hit in a while by attaching themselves to bts - the factor there is clearly bts not hype from their previous album

there's two really weird things about the new one though, it ends with a 10 minute prog epic produced by max martin, & ilx favourites KING are all over it

ilx favourites KING are all over it

say what now??

for anybody itt that releases an album, please name it New Jersey for this thread

Writing and performing with Coldplay has been such an incredible experience and we are forever grateful. We hope that you love the whole album just as much as we do! Truly a dream come true✨ pic.twitter.com/23z7uM6pCp

— We Are KING (@weareKING) October 16, 2021

they have a feature on one track, and co-wrote/provide backing vocals for a few more

unfortunately this doesn't make the album any more worth listening to

wow that's crazy i wonder how they even got hooked up with coldplay

glad they will make some money off it

This has some New Jerseys contained in it

https://www.spin.com/2021/09/1996-alternative-bubble-burst/

Midnight Oil, Blue Sky Mining

Read this thread an innumerable number of times, wanted to bump for a few potential UK examples

M People - Bizarre Fruit - 5x Platinum, outselling the 3x Platinum Elegant Slumming even though that's the one with the songs people remember. Next album was a 2x Platinum

Lighthouse Family - Postcards from Heaven - 4x Platinum to Ocean Drive's 6x Platinum, and is basically High plus some other songs. Next album was 1x Platinum

Texas - The Hush - actually this one has been mentioned already but seeing as I'm talking about 90s 'My Songs' fodder (cf. Simply Red's Life)... Although this has the advantage of being more of an event album over the previous two, i.e. i Imagine it had more cross-gen appeal by which I just mean more Radio 1 support for the two songs people remember. Only issue is the next album was the Greatest Hits, their best-seller no less and it has Inner Smile on it. Only after that did they die a death.

Wet Wet Wet - Picture This - riding on the wave of Love Is All Around, goes 3x Platinum, which was their best since Souled Out, one single even opens Now 31 but none of them are remembered now

Gilbert O'Sullivan - I'm a Writer, Not a Fighter - maybe?? I know this doesn't really work for 70s albums

Dido - Life for Rent - 9x Platinum to No Angel's 10x Platinum but is remembered only for White Flag (and the title track at a push, but I've not heard it in years). She plunged off a cliff when she returned in 2008

Maybe Catatonia's Equally Cursed and Blessed? Maybe that wasn't a major enough seller

The Beautiful South - Quench - 3x Platinum to Blue is the Colour's 5x Platinum, which is their biggest studio seller what with COUTC reviving their fortunes. But Perfect 10 is the last BS song people are likely to know, or at a push How Long's a Tear Take to Dry. Then they plummeted

I think Stereophonics should have one but I'm not sure they do. JEEP is 6x Platinum to PaC's 6x Platinum, and then their next album is only 2x Platinum. However, the latter is the one with Maybe Tomorrow and even the one after that - 1x Platinum - is the one with Dakota which is now their best known song. Growing up in the 00s I didn't get the impression Stereophonics had ceased to be 'relevant' to the public until after Dakota

Eva Cassidy - Imagine? - obviously Blix Street's Eva well would have to run dry at some point, but this still sailed to number one after Songbird, even got a non-single onto Now 53 (although that had happened with Over the Rainbow on 48 too). Only a 1x Platinum to Songbird's 6, though, but the next album was a No. 1 too although just Gold.

Embrace - This New Day? - felt vaguely big at the time, follow-up to their strangely rather successful 2004 album, but then Embrace were never major players anyway. They've had three number one albums which is maybe three more than you'd think.

Moby's 18 has been mentioned presumably from a US perspective but it's maybe a better UK example. He could still headline Glastonbury the following year but on borrowed time

25 should be an NJ and the relative bomb of 30 bares that out in one sense but 30 was still a huge event album that topped the chart for weeks. It just hasn't had the freak sales of her earlier work - and that's maybe more indicative of The Industry. I could say the same about the latest Ed Sheeran which hasn't even outsold his collaborations album (yet?), despite said collabs album being 3x Platinum to Divide's 13. George Ezra is *at last* starting to tank in overall sales so that might make his second album his NJ.

Also want to agree/counter with The Invisible Band. It should be their NJ in some sense but I think all three singles are well remembered. Flowers in the Window was inescapable when I was little despite being a low charter (radio v fanbase sales et al). I also disagree with Escapology - maybe that was the last time he dominated in an Imperial Phase sense (Knebworth et al) but that didn't stop Intensive Care doing really good business and there was a big greatest hits in the meantime. It's just that GH marks the first time his albums only get remembered for one song.

wow at reading this thread more than even once! great post, though i have nothing near the UK knowledge necessary to evaluate it.

speaking only of the US: The Invisible Band was totally DOA --- the only time i really remember hearing "Flowers in the Window" out in the world was when it showed up as the closing-credits song in the movie Saved!. to be clear, The Man Who only barely existed here - kids who listened very regularly to alt-rock radio will remember the brief couple of weeks when "Why Does It Always Rain On Me?" got airplay, and then that was about it for Travis. (Coldplay ultimately grabbed their spot, and became bigger than anybody could have ever imagined.) the only Stereophonics song that i can remember getting any kind of push at all is "Mr. Writer," which plodded along on MTV2 for a while there. good to know that 18 works as a UK NJ... imho in the US it's much much more of a Fairweather Johnson situation - total public disinterest revealing the previous record's mega-success as a one-album wonder phenomenon.

I've read it in full twice and massive goblets on numerous other occasions but always forget most of the other examples that come to mind. I'm sure I thought of a few US ones.

Looking at 18 in the UK it admittedly does have the overall sales of a Fairweather Johnson, and I'm sure it felt like his time was coming to an end, but I think even ignoring his concert demand/Glastonbury etc maybe that was still his media peak - consolidating on Play, We Are All Made of Stars seemed to have a fairly long shelf life (although like seemingly all Moby songs it is ignored by radio today) and even the lower charting singles seemed a bit more popular than their chart positions suggest (again this might be a radio v sales thing, although Moby was ofc no stranger to excessive licensing), and maybe more importantly he was quite visible as a person in the promotion from the outset (which I don't think had been the case so much with Play esp given its sleeper status). In other words I think it ticked that 'this'll be the one to make him a long-term concern' category, it debuted at number one and spent a few months in the top 20. But he'd never be nearly as lucky again.

Mr Writer is here an example of a curious and probably very small category - largely forgotten lead singles to the follow-up album to an enormous album which itself ends up being an enormous [even maybe bigger] album. Very strange decision to release a five-minute tuneless dirge with heavy promotion at such a crucial point in their discography and get away scot free.

The Invisible Band has a slight edge over their other stuff stateside because "Sing" and "Side" got used on The Office as Jim & Pam's 'songs'.

But yeah, despite some label push for that album over here upon release, it didn't happen for Travis because Coldplay and domestic bands mining similar territory like Life House, Fuel, and Vertical Horizon.

"M People - Bizarre Fruit - 5x Platinum, outselling the 3x Platinum Elegant Slumming even though that's the one with the songs people remember. Next album was a 2x Platinum"

I wonder if there's a Mercury Music Prize curse in operation, because a lot of the albums that came immediately after the one that won the prize fit this bill. The awards seem to have completely killed Ms Dynamite, for example.

P J Harvey is peculiar in that she won, the next two albums flopped, she won again, and the next album after that (The Hope Six Demolition Project) actually charted higher than its predecessor, but sold worse because it was released at a time when record sales were in the crapper. It wasn't until I looked some of these albums up that I realised how poorly they sold. Gomez were not the world-spanning titans I had been led to believe.

Oasis are probably in the 2,800 hidden messages, because Be Here Now is a canonical example. They continued to sell records, but not as many.

FWIW, this is a thread that lives and dies by opening "show all messages" and then breaking out your browser's find-text feature --- a LOT of things have been discussed, and often very entertainingly!

Brushing back up, I think nobody really disputes that in the US, Be Here Now is a Fairweather Johnson, riding entirely on momentum from the previous record... very big sales right at the release date, but collapsing super super quickly, and basically not even remotely comparable to its predecessor in 'huge event' terms.

In the UK, though, it's either a definitive New Jersey, as you suggest, or epitomizes another distinct category. Personally, I've always felt like a New Jersey's hollowness is really only seen with hindsight, after at least the arrival of the next album. My sense is that the British tide turned against Be Here Now much quicker than that. I would suggest this test: at the time that The Masterplan hit shelves, was Be Here Now still seen as being as big, great, and worthy an Oasis album as the previous two? I'm an American so I don't know!

relevant spinoff thread: "EVERY HUGE ARTIST HAS A BE HERE NOW" AKA the UK version

This thread has definitely mentioned Be Here Now but no two people have ever been able to agree if there has ever been another “New Jersey”.

In fact this thread seems to have come to the conclusion that not even New Jersey is a New Jersey.

nahhhhhh, i think a lot of the named examples got +1'ed, and a bunch got multiple votes in the poll:

BEST/MOST "BON JOVI'S NEW JERSEY" ALBUM EVER

"I'm an American so I don't know!"

My personal recollection - as a then-21-year-old music fan living in London, who read the NME - was that Be Here Etcetera got good reviews, but they were essentially "I have to give this a good review or I'll lose my job", and then there was a period of silence. By the time Oasis' next album came out everybody was prepared to admit that Be Here Now was bloated. Think of the reception that Avatar had initially and then a few years later, and then think of the way that there was a long gap before professional critics were allowed to be honest about e.g. the 2016 Ghostbusters or The Last Jedi, bearing in mind that a lot of the UK media at the time personally knew Alan McGee and enjoyed going to his parties.

And it irritates me when bands have an S at the end of their name. I hate having to say "oasissss". I want to say "oasis-es". But that's wrong, it's "oasissss". Oasisssss refrigerator was faulty. Oasissss bicycles were stolen. Etc. Like Gollum. My precious etc.

The frustrating thing is that in the context of Oasis' canon Be Here And the Rest of It isn't especially awful, it's just very long. A lot like The Stone Roses' second album. It needed two more good singles and a bit of pruning to be good. From what I've read the production wasn't especially arduous and both the band and the record company went out of their way to hype up the album's massiveness, hence the cover photo, because Alan McGee was good at publicity.

I think the key thing is that it didn't break the States. It didn't make the band massive in the United States. Britpop conquered the British charts; it failed to conquer the United States, and that's one of the reasons it fell apart. It never achieved transatlantic dominance. It worked before! We conquered the United States in the 1960s and 1980s. And British heavy rock music stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the best of the United States in the 1970s. But Britpop failed. It was trounced by the Spice Girls, which must have hurt. Imagine how angry Dodgy and Kula Shaker must have been to find that the Spice Girls were selling records in the United States and they were not.

I don't think we ever recovered. British artists have never dominated the US charts in the same way The Police and Culture Club dominated the US charts. That's why Britpop is hated today. It died a lonely sad parochial death in Britain. It was Norman Wisdom, Tommy Trinder. Small. It was small. It was built small. The only Britpop band that could have broken the States - that was an unironic rock band, not a parody band like Blur - failed to do the one thing God created it for. Oasis fired its proton torpedoes at the Death Star's exhaust port, but they malfunctioned! Which is the plot of one of the Star Wars Infinities comics. Look it up.

Be Here Now was shit, so was Morning Glory.
but Last Jedi is the best Star Wars film.

There is no need for any post-1983 Star Wars film

They all happened a long time ago

Morning Glory was shit? That's news to me. It's an almost perfect pop album.

I should have bumped the UK thread really, but I haven't read it in ages (I can see Bizarre Fruit crops up though) and it was only when doing the rounds on this thread again I was thinking more heavily

"Gomez were not the world-spanning titans I had been led to believe"

Strange though how Liquid Skin went to No. 2 on the back of it all. And it had a song on a Now album. Had the record gone one further it would be a classic example of an obscure 90s No. 1 album a la Little Angels, 2 Unlimited Real Things, Levellers Zeitgeist, The Charlatans s/t.

If Be Here Now and the reasonably slow critical turnaround (but quite fast fan turnaround) are their own category then maybe Second Coming is an even closer cousin. Select still had that at no. 12 in their 1995 EOY list. Which may say more about Britpop-height Select than the album but even so (I'd like to say Luke Haines frying the CD and snapping it in Select would be the equivalent moment to Chris Evans' failed 'resuscitation' of BHN on TFI Friday but it pre-empted the release).

Good posting from poster Westbury White Horse, though I don't know all the records they talk about.

I'm surprised to hear that 'Mr Writer' was successful as I have never heard it, only heard people laughing about it for 20 years.

2 Unlimited Real Things is a good call as a New Jersey actually - propelled by the huge momentum of the first two albums, still good sales but the gig was clearly up...and the next one, four years later, absolutely cratered.

Luke Haines fried The Stone Roses' Second Coming.

http://selectmagazinescans.monkeon.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/whatyouwanted4.jpg

I know New Jerseys don't come along often in the 2020s, but I was thinking about Halsey's "Manic." It was an event in that her last two albums were big and she was all over the radio for several years. It was coming after her biggest single "Without Me"--included on "Manic" but released 14 months earlier. It seems to have done alright (#2, 2X Platinum) but only one single came out after its release "You Should Be Sad" and it kind of flopped. The other single prior to release "Graveyard" only barely made the top 40.

Halsey may have realized what was happening, and changed course for her next album.

I should mention that "Manic" came out about a month before Corona lockdowns started, so that could be a factor.

I'd misremembered that bottom right pic of Haines as him snapping that weird gargoyle thing in half. Alas, not so easy if its spread thin over his baking paper.

Real Things was pallid stuff but I like the Tocatta overture. Out-progging the synths in "Rhythm Is a Dancer". All roads lead to Vangelis etc

Ahem, Toccata

That prompted me to think of Scissor Sisters, whose first album made them "a thing", albeit mostly in the UK. Their second album, Ta-Dah also topped the charts, and had a chart-topping single co-written by Elton John - it felt as if they had ascended to dance-pop royalty - but after that they seemed to fade away, although they did support Lady Gaga. They recorded their third album twice (the first version was scrapped) and after 2012 they went on hiatus. It has been years since I thought of them.

I have the impression they were displaced by Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, the former directly and the latter as a more-palatable-for-the-mainstream alternative. I have the impression that unlike e.g. Garbage or Florence + The Machine etc they didn't have a single central focal bandmember that the media could write about, and that limited them.

Scissor Sisters are a great shout for a NJ. The debut was 2004's biggest seller - even though it didn't manage a Top 10 hit in that year (one only came at the start of 2005 during possibly the worst month for single sales ever) - and so the launch of "Dancin'" was a big deal (I remember Channel 4 doing a video premiere of the unofficial video) and now that song has completely eclipsed all their earlier singles (of which I now only hear "Take Your Mama" in public/radio), and Ta Dah likewise.

Maybe the writing was on the wall when I bought it maybe a month after it was released second hand, having been sold back to Pink Planet Games Exchange (although they charged me slightly extra for it when they realised it was the new one, boo). I can't even remember second single "Land of a Thousand Words" - and the next two I mostly remember from giving the album infrequent listens ("I Can't Decide" was in a famous Doctor Who scene though but to some degree that's me showing my age).