Mariah Gets Best Selling Album of 2005

As I mentioned previously, Mariah Carey was in a close fight with 50 Cent for the title of best-selling album of 2005. The results are now in, and Mariah's The Emancipation of Mimi has won, with 4.97 million copies, compared to 4.85 million copies of The Massacre.

The predictions for the Febraury 8 Grammy Awards are starting to come in and they don't look good for Mariah. Chris Wilman of Entertainment Weekly thnks she will win Record of the Year for "We Belong Together" but lose Song of the Year and Album of the Year to U2. That would be a truly tragic result...., after all U2 has won Album of the Year only once before, for 1987's seminal The Joshua Tree. It has also been nominated for 1992's Achtung Baby (also an amazing album), 2001's All That You Can't Leave Behind and now last year's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb for a total of 4 album of the year Grammy nominations. Interestingly, Mariah has been nominated for album of the year 3 times: Mariah Carey, Daydream and The Emancipation of Mimi. The category is notoriously fickle, if not random. With Radiohead losing twice to lesser works by old geezers (Bob Dylan's Time Out Of Mind beat OK Computer and Steely Dan's Two Against Nature beat Kid A and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP). Are U2 themselves now the old geezers? Or will Sir Paul McCartney cause a riot by absconding with the most prestigious prize in the recording industry ahead of newbies Kanye West and Gwen Stefani? In my mind the only acceptable choices are Kanye or Mariah, so we shall see.

UPDATE 09:29AM: The New York Times confirms Mariah's win today, and then Jon Pareles whines about the shallow taste of pop music consumers. Pop music. Shallow? Shocking!