Santana Score First #1 Album In Nearly 30 Years
Veteran Latin rockers Santana will top the Billboard 200 albums
chart this week for the first time in nearly three decades.
Perhaps not surprisingly, they did it the old-fashioned way.
Most blockbuster albums these days — including Creed's Human
Clay, which Santana's Supernatural will bump to #2 after a
two-week run at #1 — debut atop the chart with huge first-week sales,
and then steadily slide their way down. In Santana's heyday in the '70s,
when the band's second and third albums, Abraxas and Santana
III, both topped the sales chart, albums more often climbed up
to the top position.
And that's what Supernatural spent the summer doing, before finally
earning the #1 spot with sales of 169,524 copies for the week ending
Sunday, according to figures released Wednesday (Oct. 20) by sales tracker
SoundScan. Creed's album sold 167,211 copies, SoundScan reported.
The rest of the top 10, according to SoundScan figures: the Backstreet
Boys' Millennium (#3); German dance-pop singer Lou Bega's A
Little Bit of Mambo (#4, up from #9); pop singer Britney Spears'
Aguilera's self-titled debut (#6); rapper Kid Rock's Devil Without a
Cause (#7); thrash-rap band Limp Bizkit's Significant Other
(#8); reggae-rockers 311's Soundsystem (debuting at #9); and rappers
Method Man and Redman's Black Out! (#10).
Supernatural, propelled by the salsa-tinged single "Smooth"
excerpt), co-written by and featuring singer Rob Thomas of Matchbox
20, entered the chart at #19 in June. The song is at #1 on the Billboard
Hot 100 singles chart.
Guitarist and bandleader Carlos Santana, who also worked with rappers
Everlast, Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean and rock singers Eric Clapton and
Dave Matthews on Supernatural, said shortly before the album's
release, "Once I heard the songs and the lyrics, I said 'Oh, man! It's
all in here!'
"So, obviously, there's some inner work happening, synchronicity ...
with inner dreams, inner dimensions, inner meditations and stuff."
Santana became popular in the late 1960s with their mixture of Latino
rhythms and pop melodies. They played the original Woodstock in 1969, at
which Carlos Santana unleashed blazing, jazzlike guitar solos. Their
early hits included covers of Fleetwood Mac's "Black Magic Woman," the
Zombies' "She's Not There" and Tito Puente's "Oye Como Va." "Smooth" is
their first #1 single.
"When [Supernatural] came out, people viewed it as just another
Santana album," Keith Medin, an employee at Tower Records in Atlanta,
said. "But when they've listened to what he's done, and the people he's
working with, they're interested."
"It's nonstop," Tony Castillo, manager at a Tower Records in New York,
said. "People will come in and pick up Celine Dion and Santana, or they'll
grab the Mos Def [album] and the Santana. It's a wide array of people."
Omaha, Neb., rockers 311 will score the week's highest debut with
Soundsystem, which continues their affinity for punk guitars and
reggae rhythms on songs such as the single "Come Original." The album
was co-produced by Hugh Padgham (Sting, XTC).
Rapper/producer Warren G, who scored top-10 hits in 1994 with "Regulate"
and "This DJ," will debut at #21 with his third album, I Want It All
excerpt of title track). The album features cameos from Snoop
Dogg, Mack 10, Kurupt, Memphis Bleek, Eve and Slick Rick. Warren G —
Dr. Dre's half-brother — said last month he especially enjoyed working
with the album's younger guests, Memphis Bleek and Eve, both of whom have
scored top-10 albums this year.
"They brought that love there that shows that the East and West Coast
can work together," he said. "And we breaking bread together and we're
successful" (RealAudio
excerpt of interview).
Rapper Mos Def will debut at #25 with the jazzy and politically forceful
Black on Both Sides. Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip make guest appearances
on the album, the first solo effort from the 26-year-old native of Brooklyn,
N.Y., who is one half of the duo Black Star. That band paid homage to
old-school rap and espoused the nationalist politics of activist Marcus
Garvey on last year's Mos Def and Talib Kweli are Black Star.
Also debuting: Eric Clapton's Clapton Chronicles: The Best of Eric
Clapton 1981–1999, featuring "Tears in Heaven" and "Change the
World," at #23; the hip-hop- and R&B-flavored soundtrack to "The Best
Man," with songs from the Roots, Faith Evans and others (#30); R&B singer
and Usher producer Donnell Jones' Where I Wanna Be (#35);
blues-guitar prodigy Kenny Wayne Shepherd's third album, Live On
(#52), which features Primus bassist Les Claypool and members of the
late Stevie Ray Vaughan's backing band, Double Trouble; Atlanta rap group
the Youngbloodz's Against the Grain (#92), with production by
OutKast collaborators Organized Noize; and hardcore rapper Spice 1, whose
Immortalized (#111) features blunt ghetto tales.
(SonicNet's Will Comerford contributed to this report.)
