What was the biggest-selling album of 2001?
Hate to break it to you, but the 2000s are a long time ago.
And we mean really long, as distant as the 1980s were at that time. Such a pointer may hit the average 30-something millennial with a pertinent sting, but the naïve optimism that surrounded the passing of the centuries, and the seeming simplicity of a life before the internet’s smothering ubiquity and its ensuing techfedual serfdom, hasn’t inspired a Y2K fascination among Gen Z for nothing.
Never mind that the rot was setting in nice and early, even back then. Inequality was widening, political paralysis was sliding into perma-stasis, and the War on Terror was due to destabilise the Middle East for decades to come. Still, the cultural impression of the early 2000s correctly wallows in a harkening for a time before sinister, Silicon Valley uniformity, a landscape of Sega Dreamcast start-ups, Flash animations, Nokia 3310s, and the GeoCities terrain of blogs that clung to the hopes of a democratising web.
Still, anybody old enough to remember will tell you that the utopian build-up of the new millennium was more exciting than its arrival. For whatever reason, the ‘end of history’s pernicious creep began to cast its clammy shadow over society from then on, a mist straight out of John Carpenter’s The Fog descending upon the Western world, engendering the financial crisis, neoliberal failure, and the slow, festering seethe that would fuel the burning political contemporary we’re all navigating to this day.
Hang on a minute, this is supposed to be a post about the biggest-selling album of 2001? Well, for many of us, casting our minds back to that distant time requires vigorous wafting away of that uniquely 2000s fug that immediately strikes the nostalgia/terror spot of the brain long buried.
However, wading through the miasma, the day’s charts all come flooding back. Whether listening to the Pepsi Chart or still catching Top of the Pops while it was good, for every Radiohead classic was the drippy Travis and Starsailor beige rock for the adults, and frosted-tipped nu-metal silliness for the kids. While bang average, The Strokes would usher in a new era of indie, for better or worse, and pop-punk was still stubbornly riding its chart wave.
Not great. Keeping within the confines of the mainstream, 2001 was the year of hip hop and R&B, Eminem, Destiny’s Child, Outkast, and Gorillaz—kinda—all dominated the year’s toppermost of the poppermost. Yet, for the year’s biggest-selling album, we have to roll up our sleeves and reach into the darkest recesses of Kerrang! TV’s heavy rotation.
So what was the biggest-selling album of 2001?
While early pioneers like Korn and Limp Bizkit had paved the way, it took California’s Linkin Park to push nu-metal to stratospheric heights of commercial success.
Dropped in October 2000, the rap metal outfit’s Hybrid Theory eventually wound up selling 4.8million copies the following year and was still selling as much as 100,000 copies a week in early 2002. Beating everybody from Michael Jackson to Alicia Keys, Linkin Park managed to whip up a pleasing blend of pop sheen and crunchy guitars that amounted to the biggest-selling nu-metal album of all time.
Indie rock landed shortly after, and nu-metal looked as silly overnight as hair metal did after grunge’s nail in the coffin. Surviving music’s rapidly shifting climate, along with Slipknot and Deftones, who owed little to nu-metal in the first place, Linkin Park swapped heavy guitars for a widescreen pop embrace, soldiering through the ensuing years with stadium-selling success and still playing today, Dead Sara’s Emily Armstrong stepping up to vocal duties after Chester Bennington’s suicide in 2017.
