Lil Wayne Back on Top

by Mark Thomas
Hip Hop Vibe Senior Staff Writer

Lil Wayne owned the Billboard Hot 100 album chart this week, with his 'I Am Not a Human Being' album settling in at the No. 1 spot. The hard copy of the album was released on October 12th, two weeks after its digital debut, and sold 125,000 units in its first week. Weezy beat out Hootie & the Blowfish frontman Darius Rucker's country-tinged solo release 'Charleston, SC 1966,' which landed at No. 2.

As a digital release, 'I Am Not a Human Being' debuted at No. 2 before dropping down to No. 16. It then propelled to No. 1 following a 443% jump in sales. Jumping from 16 to 1 on the chart is the biggest leap since Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' moved up from 156 to 1 in 2008.

The Grammy winner recorded the music and accompanying videos for the album prior to being locked up at New York's Rikers Island, where he is weeks shy of completing an eight month prison sentence. "He had so much music," Wayne's Cash Money lablehead Brian 'Birdman' Williams stated. "This is what he wanted to put out. We kind of sat down and envisioned what we wanted to do before he left. Putting a project out was one of the things we wanted to do because we didn't want to not put [any] music out."

Wayne is, of course, no stranger to topping the charts. In 2008, at a time when the record industry was struggling in sales, his sixth studio album, 'The Carter III,' sold 1.01 million copies in its first week, making it the first album to top a million since 50 Cent's 'The Massacre' back in 2005.

Wayne is scheduled to be released from prison the first week of November.