For the first time in 122 weeks, hip-hop albums seize both the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on the Billboard 200 albums chart. On the list dated Feb. 24, Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures 1 reigns, while Yeat’s 2093 debuts at No. 2. The pair makes for the first time that hip-hop has twin titles atop the chart since Oct. 30, 2021, when Young Thug’s Punk and Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, nabbed the top two spots.
The Punk–Certified Lover Boy moment was the ninth such double for hip-hop on the Billboard 200 in 2021, capping a year that saw additional chart-toppers from Moneybagg Yo, DJ Khaled, J. Cole, Lil Baby, Lil Durk, Tyler the Creator, and YoungBoy Never Broke Again. But, despite no one-two lockdown in 2022 or 2023, hip-hop still maintained top standing among listeners, with R&B/hip-hop as both years’ most-streamed genre by total album consumption, according to Luminate. (R&B/hip-hop is an umbrella genre for Luminate that contains most titles categorized as R&B and/or rap. Individual statistics for R&B or rap are not available for the purposes of such research.)
While hip-hop’s 122-week break between holding both the gold and silver medal is certainly rare for this era, it doesn’t quite touch the record gap of just under four years in the early 1990s. On the chart dated Jan. 19, 1991, Vanilla Ice’s To The Extreme and MC Hammer’s Please Hammer Don’t Hurt ‘Em ranked at Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, marking the 12th consecutive week that the blockbuster albums had locked up the top two spots. After those titans surrendered the summit, hip-hop needed until Nov. 5, 1994, to recapture the top pair, with the Murder Was the Case soundtrack (No. 1) and Scarface’s The Diary (No. 2) becoming the magic combination.
As hip-hop scores its winning week, two different hip-hop No. 1 albums – Vultures 1 and 21 Savage’s American Dream – in the first two months of the year already prevents a repeat of a discussion point that piqued interest in 2023. Last year, the genre didn’t find a No. 1 album in the first half of the year – the longest wait of any calendar year since 1993. Largely due to the dominance of albums such as SZA’s R&B set SOS and Morgan Wallen’s country collection One Thing at a Time, hip-hop couldn’t capture the flag until July, when Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape finally ended the shutout.
