Ye, the rapper and provocateur formerly known as Kanye West, has the No. 1 album for a second week with “Vultures 1,” narrowly beating out a new release from Oregon rapper Yeat.
“Vultures 1,” a joint LP with singer Ty Dolla Sign, holds the top spot on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 75,000 sales in the United States, including 95 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete package, according to tracking service Luminate.
A year and a half ago, the always-controversial Ye became radioactive in the music industry after a series of antisemitic remarks that left him without a major-label record deal or a booking agent. (Late last year, he apologized in a social media post — written in Hebrew — just days after giving a rambling rant that included accusations against Zionists and “the Rothschilds.”)
Now Ye is trying to make a comeback, and it may be working. He released “Vultures 1” independently and promoted the album with a pair of well-attended listening events at arenas in Chicago and Long Island, New York. It is Ye’s first album to spend more than a single week at No. 1 since “Watch the Throne,” a joint LP with Jay-Z, which logged two straight weeks in the summer of 2011. According to an estimate computed by Billboard, “Vultures 1” earned about $1 million in its first week from sales and streams in the United States alone.
Yeat opens at No. 2 with “2093,” his fourth studio album, which had the equivalent of 70,000 sales, including 79 million streams and 12,000 traditional sales. The album, which features guest appearances by Future and Lil Wayne, was helped by the release of two deluxe versions, one of them adding a track featuring Drake.
Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 3, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 4, and SZA’s “SOS” is in fifth place.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
