The #1 Hot 100 Song and other #1’s on Billboard for the week of August 23, 2008
Break out the cherry chapstick…the reign of the Perry is over! Katy Perry’s 7-week stay atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart for her song, “I Kissed a Girl,” has ended, and the new #1 song is…(drumroll)…Rihanna’s “Disturbia.” After selling 148,000 downloads, the song leapfrogs over Chris Brown’s “Forever” (which remains at #2) to take the top spot. So…how long will we get disturbed by the Rihanna song now? “Forever” has a bullet, so it could be a contender. The other contender is M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” which is the week’s Sales Gainer, jumping from #16 to #5 with a bullet. the song is in the trailer for the movie Pineapple Express, but is not in the movie itself or on the soundtrack (an interesting aside: I went to Best Buy to buy the soundtrack, since my favorite artist, Huey Lewis & The News, performs the movie’s title track…and they had already deleted it out of their system! I had to order it online. Maybe if the producers of the soundtrack had known that the movie’s trailer song would be more popular than the music within the movie, then they could have included it as a bonus track or something.)
The new Hot 100 song isn’t the only change on the Billboard charts. The #1 album on the Top 200 Albums chart is the Mamma Mia! movie soundtrack. It ascends to the peak position for the first time in its fifth week on the chart. It is the second soundtrack this year to top the chart, following the Juno soundtrack in January. The last year two or more soundtracks earned the top spot on the Top 200 Albums chart was in 1998, when the Titanic, City of Angels, and Armageddon soundtracks all went to #1. Ironically, ABBA, the group whose music is in the movie, never even had a top 10 album, much less a #1 album. The closest they ever got was 1978’s The Album, which peaked at #14 and included the #3 hit “Take a Chance on Me.” Lil Wayne’s “A Milli” dethrones Keyshia Cole’s long-running #1, “Heaven Sent,” after nine consecutive weeks atop the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Taylor Swift has her second #1 on Hot Country Songs chart (behind “Our Song”) as “Should’ve Said No” jumps from #5 to #1. The only chart that stays the same this week is the Modern Rock chart, where The Foo Fighters top it for a fourth week with “Let It Die,” while Shinedown’s “Devour” ends the 14-week reign of Disturbed’s “Inside the Fire” on Mainstream Rock chart. All chart information was found on Billboard.com.
Like I mentioned earlier, we’ll have to see how long “Disturbia” stays at the top. Will Brown or M.I.A. topple her? Will Perry jump back to #1 for an eighth week? (Don’t laugh…it’s happened before…just this year alone. Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” and Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” had non-consecutive stays at the top of the chart.) Leave a reply below!