What is the best-selling hip-hop album of all time?
As perhaps one of the newest of the major umbrella genres, hip-hop first came into existence in the 1970s as an underground movement that saw Black Americans tackle social issues through a myriad of beats, rhymes, funk, disco and soul samples. It may have had somewhat modest beginnings, but gradually over the course of the subsequent decades, it has found its place as a game-changing genre that has gone on to shape and almost usurp modern pop music.
The number of legendary artists to have emerged since the birth of the genre is staggering, and many of them have helped pull it in directions that have created their own new subgenres. However, if we’re talking about the megastars of today’s climate, you’ve got the likes of Post Malone, Drake, and Travis Scott raking in astronomically large streaming figures on every new release of theirs, and this only goes to show just how much of a culturally significant force the genre has become.
However, when it comes to landmark achievements relating to record sales in any genre, you’ve got to look back a little further in time, and considering that physical sales aren’t as prominent as they used to be due to the streaming boom and immense rise in production costs driving up the price of an LP or CD, it’s the older albums that tend to fare best in these charts.
With that in mind, you’d expect one of the earlier examples of a mainstream hip-hop act to have the honour of having released the biggest-selling hip-hop record of all time, with acts such as Run-DMC having been prominent in the 1980s, and Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. having battled it out for hip-hop’s throne during the period. However, it’s none of the aforementioned acts that have been blessed with such an accolade, and one of the latecomers to the scene that achieved infamy with the genre’s best-selling record.
So, what is the biggest-selling hip-hop record of all time?
While one might think that albums by artists who have had an immeasurable influence on the genre deserve to be the biggest-selling hip-hop records of all time, there are no such accolades to be given to the likes of Kendrick Lamar, OutKast or Public Enemy despite their valiant efforts to triumph in this regard. In fact, only one hip-hop album has ever sold above 20 million units worldwide, and it arrived towards the tail end of the CD-dominated era before streaming came in and swept aside physical sales as the main metric of popularity and dominance.
Detroit rapper Eminem’s third official studio album, 2002’s The Eminem Show, is the biggest-selling album that the genre has to offer, having shifted a gargantuan 27 million copies worldwide to date. Eminem had by this point already established himself as a star with the release of his two previous records, The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP, and had enjoyed significant amounts of success thanks to the singles that arose from these records, but the immense figures recorded by the rapper with The Eminem Show are what make this record a victory lap of sorts.
Singles from the album include the two standout hits in ‘Without Me’ and ‘Cleanin’ Out My Closet’, and the two slightly less acclaimed ‘Superman’ and ‘Sing for the Moment’, but the record still garnered plenty of praise for how it represented a maturation from the artist. Previously seen as an enfant terrible in hip-hop, constantly using shocking lyricism in order to provoke a strong reaction from both fans and critics of his work, the themes displayed on The Eminem Show were somewhat pared back, with far less puerile humour and vividly violent imagery being employed.
That being said, it’s still a record that can be enjoyed by fans of his previous work, and that doesn’t mean that his moments of playfulness and aggression are entirely absent from this record. However, it would represent the final album in his discography where critics and fans seemed to unanimously agree he was performing at the highest level, with the quality of his work significantly dropping after this point, with all albums from Encore onwards receiving increased scrutiny.
But why Eminem and not any of the other deserving hip-hop pioneers? His work may not have had the same level of artistry as other groundbreaking rappers of his era, but what he did manage to do was package hip-hop in a way that was marketable to the masses, with mainstream pop elements, comedic elements and a sense of roguish charm all making him an outlier in the field. Of course, following his rise and subsequent fall, people have become significantly more receptive to other variants of hip-hop, whether more extreme or commercialised, but Eminem arguably paved the way for hip-hop’s rise to dominance in the charts and made an immeasurable mark on the trajectory of the genre forever.
