Let’s see… In this week’s Top Ten, we have a country group, what passes for a rock band, a few oldsters, a couple rappers, a super gay TV soundtrack, a Spanish-language hip shaker, a Christian rock band, and Hootie. And those are the biggest selling albums of the week. This is the mainstream. We’re a fragmented fucking society, yo. And then there’s all the “weird” stuff outside of the Top Ten.
1. Sugarland – “The Incredible Machine” – 203,000 (debut)
2. Kings of Leon – “Come Around Sundown” – 184,000 (debut)
3. Elton John and Leon Russell – “The Union” – 80,000 (debut)
4. Rod Stewart – “Fly Me To The Moon” – 79,000 (debut)
5. Lil Wayne – “I Am Not a Human Being,” – 65,000 (down 49%)
6. “Glee: the Rocky Horror Glee Show” – 48,000 (debut)
7. Shakira – “Sale El Sol” – 46,000 (debut)
8. Eminem – “Recovery” – 43,000 (down 15%)
9. Third Day – “Move” – 37,000 (debut)
10. Darius Rucker – “Charleston, SC 1966” – 37,000 (down 63%)
Further down:
11. Miley Cyrus – “Hannah Montana Forever” – 27,000 (debut)
12. Bob Dylan – “The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (the Bootleg Series Vol. 9)” – 26,000 (debut)
• Overall album sales in this past chart week (ending Oct. 24) totaled 5.17 million units
• Digital track sales this past week totaled 18.58 million downloads,
Additional sales data via MTV.
One real rock band in the top 10. Ugh. Only 10 years ago the Pumpkins’ break-up album (Machina) was released and sold 165k units in one week. That was considered so bad that the record company didnt’ want to release any more of their material. The band handed out the rest of the tracks from that recording session for FREE. Jimmy Chamberlain commented that “It was like watching your kid flunking out of school after getting straight A’s for ten years.”
Had that flop of an album been released to 165k units last week, it would have been #3!!
Oh how times have changed.
What’s interesting about this list is the distribution. Note how There are 203K and 184K then a deep drop down to 80K. Take Lil’ Wayne’s fifth position out of the list and you see how the numbers cluster in pairs–even 11 and 12. Perhaps there is some sort of physical shipment pattern here, but as I am not Malcolm Gladwell, I won’t throw out a theory. Still, seems kind of odd.
Every time I think Rock has died for the last time I have to remember how many weeks “Endless Love” spent at number 1. I think it would be interesting to see a breakdown of the top 100 catagorized by genera week by week since 1980.
Can somebody at GloNo get on that.. ?
machina debuted at #3 back then as well. it was the fast drop off in sales and billy corgan announcing that the band would be breaking up at the end of 2000 that probably played a lot into the label not wanting to invest any more in a band that would no longer exist.
at least with the acts on this week’s charts, they still can make money for their labels/management companies one way or another through touring and promoting their music for licensing.
all the same, it was pretty cool of them to get their music out there through fans and the internet. i give them a lot of credit for that. especially while at the same time metallica was striking back at napster. two very distinctly different way to view their fans and how people consume entertainment. think smashing pumpkins won that battle, for better or worse.
Not to turn this into a Pumpkins thing, but once James and D’arcy were gone, the Pumpkins weren’t a “they” anylonger. It was always Billy’s band, but you can tell from the sound of the band where they stepped off that train. I really wish Billy hadn’t resurrected the band’s name. I can’t even watch the pre Machina videos. For some reason their break-up for me is a bad ending to a decade that produced more great Rocki n Roll that the one we just suffered through.
Corgan is currently streaming his new songs from his website. It has to be quite an experience, though, to be riding in limos and playing Stadiums to giving your shit away for free and playing bars. Or for D’arcy, living on a Horse Farm in Southhaven.
I don’t know exactly how influential Iha and D’Arcy were in sculpting the Pumpkins’ sound. They didn’t write the songs and barely played on the albums, so…
“…a decade that produced more great Rock n Roll that the one we just suffered through.”
Amen.
I don’t know how influencial any of the other original 3 were in recording those first 5 albums, but you can really hear a difference starting at the point where they stopped getting along (due to drugs or personalities or whatever).
If you look at all of it as just being Billy’s work, there’s no accounting for the drop in the quality of Rock that you hear once he had no one else working with him in the studio.
I like it all, even the stuff streaming right now on his web site. But no one can tell me that “A Song For A Son” is anywhere close to the Rock awesomeness of “Mayonaise” or “Zero.”