Motley Crue: Number Four With a Mullet
Hope you didn’t throw away the spandex and hairspray. Motley Crue,
the consummate ’80s hair metal band, is back with a hit album, the
wonderfully titled, “Generation Swine.” For the week ending June
29, “Swine” sold 81,000 copies, making it the nation’s No. 4 album,
according to SoundScan. The top five showing is mighty impressive
for an act — and a genre, for that matter — that’s been dormant
for nearly a decade. But the record’s true test of popularity will
come in the next few weeks, assuming all the hardcore Crue fans ran out and bought the record its first week in stores.
For the most part, it was a quiet sales week, with the biggest
news coming from the Insane Clown Posse, a group that sold 18,000
records despite the fact that its album was supposed to have been
pulled from record stores shelves.
The Spice Girls’ “Spice regained the No. 1 spot (with sales of
123,000 copies). It was followed by Hanson’s “Middle of Nowhere”
(98,000); Tim McGraw’s “Everywhere” (90,000); “Generation Swine”;
the soundtrack to “Batman & Robin” (80,000); Bob Carlisle’s
“Butterfly Kisses” (79,000); “God’s Property” (73,400); the Wu-Tang
Clan’s “Wu-Tang Forever” (70,000); the Wallflowers’
“Bringing Down the Horse” (68,000); and Jewel’s “Pieces of You”
(63,000). The only other top 20 debut was “Carnival,” the solo
album from the Fugees’ Wyclef Jean, which sold 52,000 copies to come
in at No. 16.
But the week’s real story was down at No. 63, in the form of
the Insane Clown Posse’s “The Great Milenko.” The Walt Disney
Co.-owned Hollywood Records pulled the white rap duo’s album from stores on
June 24, claiming it contained inappropriate lyrics. But “The Great
Milenko” still managed to sell 18,000 copies. When a label requests
returns on a record that has already been shipped to retail, as
“Milenko” had been,” stores have the option to comply or not to.
Obviously, most retailers hung onto their copies of the album.