Eminem breaks UK chart record with new album.
Eminem has broken 36-year-old UK chart record for consecutive No 1 albums, beating a record held jointly for 36 years by Abba and Led Zeppelin.
It is the US rapper’s ninth straight album release to hit number one, said the UK Official Charts Company.
“Does this mean I get to call myself Sir Eminem?”, asked the 45-year-old, real name Marshall Mathers III.
His last album was panned by critics and snubbed by some fans, though it topped the British charts nonetheless.
Eminem caught the entertainment world off guard with the surprise release of “Kamikaze”, his 10th solo album, produced less than nine months after his last effort.
Kamikaze is the fourth-fastest selling album this year in the UK, behind Arctic Monkeys, Drake and George Ezra, and outsold the No 2 album, the soundtrack to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, by three copies to one.
The album’s opening track, The Ringer, also reached No 4 in the singles chart – it features an attack on Donald Trump, describing him as an “evil serpent” – while two other album tracks, Lucky You and Fall, also reached the Top 10.
After garnering a reputation as a formidable “battle rapper” in the late 1990s, Eminem broke into the mainstream in 1999 after being mentored and signed by Dr Dre, with his debut album The Slim Shady LP. It remains the only one of his albums not to reach No 1 in the UK, though two of its singles reached the top five.
While that album showcased his cartoonishly violent alter ego Slim Shady, he let his own voice come through on the follow-up, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP – regarded by many as one of the greatest rap albums of all time.
Critics have been less kind in the years since, as Eminem struggled with prescription drug addiction, but his popularity hasn’t waned – 160,000 tickets to his pair of concerts at Twickenham stadium in July sold out in minutes.
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