The death of rock ‘n’ roll? The last guitar record to sell one million copies in a week
Art and chart have always been a lot further away from each other than a mere ‘ch’. However, there is an argument that the gulf has been growing amid the dawn of pop culture. For instance, in the 1960s, the best-selling album of the decade was the wildly avant-garde Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. Rock ‘n’ roll ruled the waves for many years. However, with the rise of tech, commercialism became insurgent.
In 2022, the only new release that charted in the end-of-year best sellers list was Arctic Monkeys’ album The Car which ranked 17th. Nevertheless, there was also evidence that counterculture still sustains its buzz with Fleetwood Mac’s 50-year celebration release, Don’t Stop, being the eighth biggest-selling record as Stevie Nicks’ friendship with Harry Styles continues to bring the group to a younger generation.
So, there is certainly life in rock ‘n’ roll yet. It’s the genre that refuses to die and has been resuscitated with a new release a hundred times over. That being said, it’s perhaps true that its commercial prominence has waned. There is no finer evidence for that than the fact that the last so-called ‘rock’ record to hit one million units sold in its first week of sale came in 2000.
The record in question may hint that it also deserves to be cast in the shade for a little while because the album in question was Chocolate Starfish & the Hot Dog Flavored Water by the permanently baseball-capped rap-rockers Limp Bizkit. Led by Fred Durst, the band enamoured a generation of youth when the music video for ‘Rollin” hit MTV and, if you were 12, it proved to be the coolest thing in the world.
The fact that it was MTV that helped to buoy the album to record-breaking heights is indicative of how the culture was changing. Would ‘Rollin” have been as popular if it was just reliant on old-fashioned radio plays? While the answer to that is largely unknowable, it is easy to see that the internet was dawning, and the new-media reign of trends and fads were dictating the charts more than ever.
Following the release of Chocolate Starfish & the Hot Dog Flavored Water, an era of rap proved dominant, with 50 Cent and Eminem among the next artists to hit a million in their first week. However, this trend was then bucked by the biggest star of the day, Taylor Swift, with her third album Speak Now. Each of her subsequent releases has also achieved the feat, with Adele and Lady Gaga also managing it.
Perhaps a man telling his detractors “Kiss my starfish, my chocolate starfish” was the beginning of the end for incendiary rockers. As of now, alternative music has transitioned towards more artistic tenets. As David Byrne commented on the indie generation that followed: ”The ambition wasn’t, ‘I want to be a star. I want to throw televisions on the floor and be driven by chauffeurs.’ It was really, ‘What excites me the most is making great music.’ That’s the vibe I got from this generation of musicians. That’s great. That seems incredibly healthy, besides the fact a lot of them are making really good music.” And that often doesn’t equal chart success.
