DMX Hangs onto to Number One Spot on the Charts
It’s back to reality at the nation’s record stores as the
post-holiday sales lull takes hold. There’s not one new record in
the top 150, and only the two-week-old soundtrack to The
Faculty, featuring the remake of Pink Floyd‘s
“Another Brick in the Wall,” actually increased sales over the
previous week. Not that there wasn’t lots of jockeying for chart
position, it was just a question of which artists’ sales decreases
were the smallest. The answer: Rap artists, that’s who.
For the second straight week, New York rapper DMX
had no trouble hanging on to the No. 1 album in the country,
according to SoundScan. For the week ending Jan. 3, DMX’s second
album in less than a year, Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My
Blood, sold 248,000 copies. (Breaking with industry tradition,
which says new albums cannot be released just days before Christmas
because they’ll get lost in the shuffle, DMX’s latest, released
three days before Christmas, has sold 918,000 copies in two weeks.
So much for tradition.)
But even DMX’s sales were off sixty-three percent compared to last
week’s steroid numbers, when forty-six different albums broke the
100,000 sales mark. This week, just twelve managed that magic
number. Still, certain acts are clearly connecting with fans and
climbing the charts, including the Offspring (who
jump from No. 8 to No. 2), Jay-Z (10 to 3),
Tupac (11 to 6), Busta Rhymes (21
to 12), R. Kelly (31 to 19),
Outkast (56 to 37), Limp Bizkit
(55 to 39) and Ice Cube (83 to 48).
From the top, it was DMX, followed by the Offspring’s
Americana (selling 174,000 copies), Jay-Z’s Vol. II:
Hard Knock Life (170,000); Mariah Carey‘s
No. 1’s (162,000); ‘N Sync (161,000); Tupac’s
Greatest Hits (152,000); Garth Brooks‘
Double Live (148,000); Jewel‘s
Spirit (146,000); The Backstreet Boys (114,000)
and Lauryn Hill‘s The Miseducation of Lauryn
Hill (113,000).