Chicago Def NYC 957,000 - 691,000

Kanye West tops 50 Cent in rap showdown with biggest sales week in two years

The question of the day for 50 Cent: How’s your golf game?

Kanye West’s “Graduation” sold a whopping 957,000 copies, easily topping the 691,000 sales by 50 Cent’s “Curtis,” Neilsen Soundscan reported Wednesday.

A few weeks ago, 50 Cent (New York rapper Curtis Jackson) said he’d retire if he didn’t outsell West, who grew up on Chicago’s South Side, when their new albums went head-to-head this week for supremacy on the Billboard 200 album chart.

The publicity ploy worked, stirring up a beehive of publicity and contributing to a record-setting week at retail stores: it was the first time the top two albums in the country each topped 600,000 sales since 1991. The best previous opening week this year was 625,000 sales by Linkin Park in May. "Graduation" also had the biggest one-week sales of any album since 50 Cent's second album, "The Massacre," topped 1.1 million in March 2005.

In the process, the rap rivals gave a much-needed boost to music retailers, who had been suffering through a dismal year, with album sales down 14 percent from last year.

Almost lost in the West-50 Cent hub-bub was Kenny Chesney, whose “Just Who I Am: Poets & Pirates” bowed with 387,000 sales, the largest sales week for a country album since the Dixie Chicks’ “Taking the Long Way” sold 526,000 last year.

Rolling in at No. 4 was the "High School Musical 2" soundtrack with 133,000 copies. The top four albums this week accounted for more sales than all titles combined on last week's entire
Billboard 200, Billboard.com reports.

greg@gregkot.com