New Jersey is a small plot of land adjacent to New York City and the surrounding area. Originally settled by well-to-do Dutchmen, it decreased in importance as New York began its ascent into the upper stratosphere of cool. Meanwhile, New Jersey continued being more relevant than Delaware, that combination hick/pollution state.
Bands know this. Every time a major band tours, they always hit New York. Hell, they even might do a few shows upstate. People from New Jersey know this as they have to take the colossal failure known as New Jersey transit, transferring multiple times before they arrive in Penn Station, before taking yet another train to Brooklyn.
Despite their obvious limitations, New Jersey can attract touring bands in a large variety of ways:
1. When you arrive into Newark airport, you see a stop for a “Penn Station” only it isn’t actually in New York but in the industrial armpit known as Newark. Bands who have English as a second or third language thus get fooled into playing for the hipsters in the area who were too poor to afford New York
2. Newark airport looms large over this one as well. As you wait for your flight out of Newark, you can decide to play a small show in Hoboken. Hoboken is kind of like Williamsburg except older and with Hipsters having evolved into the next phases of life, both cool dads and yuppies. That way you can make enough to afford one of those in flight sandwiches as you head towards a hipper city like Austin or Portland.
3. This is called the “Mom and Pop” theory. Like Long Island, many people in New Jersey immediately realized how boring and lame their state was. Upon their graduation from High School, they applied to whatever New York based school they could and never looked back. James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem fame did this, as did countless others. Eventually you’re forced to at least keep in touch with those who spawned you. Thus, a short stop to collect money and affection makes economic sense. Call it the “parents show”.
4. You are on the New Jersey turnpike and understand why truck drivers get paid more for driving up North (this is assuming you’re a band outside the Northeast area). Slowly but surely you lose your mind and get hopelessly. Eventually you find an ultra-shitty (and actually sort of creepy) small bar and are forced to play in order to obtain free beer and Buffalo wings. Your life is at an all-time low. The reverse works for bands coming from up north going to PA, etc.
So New Jersey doesn’t offer any coolness of its own. Instead, it holds this “mooching pattern” as a way of siphoning off the cool, kind of like how you used to impress others by stealing your cooler sibling’s clothing. You didn’t know it was cool; you had just run out of things to wear and failed to understand basic laundry etiquette.
Hopefully at some point New Jersey evolves beyond this wretched cultural starvation. Perhaps someday bands really will want to tour there, instead of just being sort of stuck there waiting for their plane or getting horribly lost.