Who terminated Drake’s 9 week reign atop the US charts?
Blink 182 has knocked Drake’s Views album from the top of the US charts, the end of an epic run. The album claimed the number one spot on the Billboard 200 chart for nine weeks, the third-best run for a hip-hop release.
Drake has spent more time at No. 1 than any male artist in over 10 years. The two albums that beat Views were released in the 90s: Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme, which attained 16 weeks at the top, and MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt Em, which spent 21 weeks at the top.
Last week, the Blink 182 trio also claimed their first UK number one with California, knocking Adele’s 25 off the top of the charts. California debuts at number one after gaining 186,000 equivalent album units in the week ending July 7th, according to Nielsen Music. Of this, 172,000 were traditional album sales.
According to Billboard, it has been over 15 years since the band last topped the Billboard 200 chart. Blink 182’s first No. 1 album was Take Off Your Pants And Jacket in 2001. Billboard says this is the largest gap between a number one album for any act since 2012, and the longest for a rock band since 2008.
Thats’s not to say that Views won’t regain the top spot. For the past 10 weeks, sales have surpassed 100,000 every single week. But appearing in the rearview is Schoolboy Q’s latest album, Blank Face LP, which may make regaining to top spot a little more difficult.
(Image by thecomeupshow, Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic, cc by 2.0)