Kendrick Lamar becomes first hip-hop artist to land three albums in Billboard Top 10 at the same time
Kendrick Lamar is having the best Black History Month ever. In fact, his calendar year starting in March 2024 has been pretty extraordinary, and well, the accolades haven’t stopped piling up.
For starters, at this year’s Grammy Awards ceremony, Lamar won five awards for his chart-topping diss record “Not Like Us” — you may have heard it — including the night’s most coveted song awards. The tune won both the “Song of the Year” and “Record of the Year” awards; it also won “Best Rap Song” but I’m not sure that category was ever much of a competition.
The following weekend, Kendrick Lamar headlined the Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show in New Orleans, where his show and setlist were the subject of tremendous amounts of analysis and internet discussion. Regardless of whether or not people liked the show and the symbolism (or understood it), Lamar’s performance had an (maybe) unintended positive impact: In the week since the Super Bowl, three of Lamar’s albums landed in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 albums chart, making him the first rapper to ever achieve the feat in the 69-year history of the Billboard 200 chart.
Lamar’s latest album, “GNX,” jumped from the number 4 spot back to the top of the charts (where it debuted in December), “DAMN.,” the album for which Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize in music, jumped from 29 to 9, and his first major label album, the semi-autobiographical “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” jumped from 27-10. Lamar’s “To Pimp A Butterfly,” “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers,” and the “Black Panther OST” also saw jumps on the charts.
The last act to place (at least) three albums in the top 10 at the same time was Taylor Swift in 2023; Swift placed five albums in the top 10 of the Dec. 9, 2023 chart. Before Lamar, Prince was the last male artist to achieve the feat after he passed in April 2016.
As a point of note, the Super Bowl performance isn’t always guaranteed to push a performer’s work to the top of the charts. The last artist to see their work hit the top of the charts after a Super Bowl performance was Justin Timberlake in 2018 for his “Man in The Woods” album, which was released a few days before the Super Bowl that year.
While Lamar’s success is profound on its own, his Super Bowl performance co-star, SZA, also saw her critically-acclaimed album, “SOS,” rise from the number 3 slot to the number 2 slot, marking the first time that two Super Bowl performers occupied the numbers 1 and 2 slots on the top albums chart following the sporting event.
