So the numbers are in for Busta Rhymes' first week sales. 209,000 copies sold doesn't strike me as being all that impressive, but I imagine some people will view it that way. Because there isn't anything good out right now, that was good enough to land Busta the #1 spot on Billboard's Top 200 - the first time, in fact, that Bussa Bus has managed such a feat.

Still, it'll be interesting to see how The Big Bang does in the following weeks. Even cruddy albums like Blood Money and Killa Season debuted near, if not at the top of the charts. The true test will be how much sales drop after the first week or so.

Gnarls Barkley's St. Elsewhere, for example, has actually been climbing the charts every week since it was released, on the strength of their god-awful, multi-format smash "Crazy." I don't know that any of the singles released from The Big Bang though are as well-liked as "Crazy."

I suppose it does seem like a great marketing idea to release three different singles from the album to try to hit three different formats - "Touch It" for people who like club records, "I Love My Bitch" for, um, the bitches, and "New York Shit" for the three people who still care about New York.

Only thing is, nobody really likes any of those songs. None of them are really bad in the "Laffy Taffy" sense of the term bad, but none of them are really that good either. If this album had a "Woo Ha" or something, I'm sure it could've done twice as many its first week out.

In fact, I think the real story with The Big Bang is how they brought in all these big-name producers and still ended up with so many duds. Not unlike TI's similarly underwhelming King, The Big Bang features a whole gaggle of kinda-wack beats by big name producers.

King did a lot better than The Big Bang its first week out, but primarily on the strength of "What You Know" and "Why You Wanna." I don't even know who produced either of them. Maybe it was our good friend DJ Drama. Meanwhile, I doubt that Pharrell garbage will be released as a single.

Compare either of these albums to something like The Documentary, where wack-ass The Game was able to command a whole album of great beats by a litany of top-shelf producers. It's too bad he's not a better rapper.

Shit sandwiches like Blood Money and Killa Season may have also failed to set the world of fire, but I doubt the labels spent nearly as much to produce or promote either of them. In that sense. The Big Bang can only be compared to albums like The Massacre and The Documentary.

Given the amount of money and media hype sunk into this album, I think you'd have to view it as a fairly monumental failure.

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