On the music charts this week, Nicki Minaj scores the top album with her first studio LP in five years, and Mariah Carey claims the No. 1 single once again with her inescapable seasonal hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Minaj has been teasing her latest album, “Pink Friday 2,” for at least four years, and for a while it had seemed questionable that it would ever come; at one point, Minaj even announced (and quickly retracted) her retirement from music. But “Pink Friday 2,” her fifth studio album — titled as a sequel to her 2010 debut — finally came out on Dec. 8, and it opens at the top of the Billboard 200 chart, becoming her third No. 1 album. “Pink Friday 2” had the equivalent of 228,000 sales in the United States, with 170 million streams and 92,000 copies sold as a complete package, including 25,000 on vinyl.
Also this week, Taylor Swift’s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” holds at No. 2 and Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 3, while the 20-year-old Canadian pop singer Tate McRae arrives at No. 4 with “Think Later,” her second studio LP. Michael Bublé’s “Christmas” is in fifth place.
Carey, whose 1994 holiday bauble “All I Want for Christmas Is You” took a 25-year path to No. 1 — and has notched a total of 12 weeks at the top over the last four Christmas seasons — retakes the top spot this week, for its 13th cumulative time at No. 1.
For the last two weeks, the No. 1 position on the Hot 100 singles chart had belonged to Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which was released in 1958 and got a promotional push this year with a music video and TikTok spots. “Rockin’” drops this week to No. 2.
