Sadly for them, both have now wound up on the wrong end of a recount.
This morning, the rapper appeared to have a Phelpsian tip-of-the-finger win on the album charts as initial figures showed his LAX topping Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone by 13 copies—238,285 to 238,272—prompting sites such as RollingStone.com to declare the Game the biggest seller of the week.
But before you could say hanging chad, the tallies were rerun, resulting in a stunning reversal of fortunes.
Slipknot ended up with its first ever No. 1 album, selling a revised 239,516 copies, per what we hope are the final, official numbers from Nielsen SoundScan. The Game, who hoped to go 3-for-3 with chart-topping albums, instead got downgraded to No. 2 with sales of 238,382.
The SoundScan folks do realize this guy's got felony weapons charges on his rap sheet, don't they?
Regardless, the two-time Grammy nominee must now settle for his first No. 2 album after topping the charts with 2005's The Documentary and 2006's Doctor's Advocate. He must take some consolation in being the only West Coast rapper with a multiplatinum album (Documentary) this side of Y2K.
Slipknot, meanwhile, can celebrate the strange turn of events. The costume-happy Hawkeye State rockers previously scored a No. 3 bow with 2001's Iowa and a No. 2 bow with 2004's Grammy-winning Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses).
The Jonas Brothers, who held the top spot for the past two weeks, slipped to No. 3, selling another 80,000 copies of A Little Bit Longer.
In all, there were four Top 10 debuts for the week ended Sunday. The inaugural Now That's What I Call Country collection sold 50,000 copies at No. 7. The latest Now! series offshoot features 20 tracks by artists like Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift and Sugarland.
Solange Knowles didn't quite match the success of big sis Beyonc, but still managed to open at No. 9 as her second solo album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, moved 46,000 copies. That's a marked improvement over her 2003 debut, Solo Star, which scored an underwhelming No. 49 debut.
Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, which dropped to No. 11 last week, inched back up to No. 10. But a couple of Disneyfied Top 10 regulars, Miley Cyrus' Breakout and the Camp Rock soundtrack, fell to 11 and 16, respectively.
Outside the Top 10, the Verve debuted at No. 23 with 21,000 copies of the comeback album Forth, the Brit band's first new release in 11 years. The group, which broke up soon after their global hit "Bitter Sweet Symphony," received an even grander welcome across the pond earlier this week with a No. 1 debut on the U.K. charts.
Other notable debuts included Luis Fonsi's Palabras del Silencio at No. 15, Dragonforce's Ultra Beatdown at No. 18, Jimmy Wayne's Do You Believe Me Now? at No. 27, Lost Trailers' Holler Back at No. 32 and B.B. King's classic sound revival, One Kind Favor, at No. 37.
Overall, album sales were up 2 percent from the previous week but down nearly 7 percent compared to the same period in 2007, when High School Musical 2 logged its third week at No. 1.
Next week, America gets a better gauge of the New Kids reunion hype when their new album The Block makes its debut.
Here's a recap of the Top 10:
1. All Hope Is Gone, Slipknot
2. LAX, The Game
3. Rock N Roll Jesus, Kid Rock
4. A Little Bit Longer, Jonas Brothers
5. Mamma Mia! soundtrack, various
6. Tha Carter III, Lil Wayne
7. Now That's What I Call Country!, various
8. Love on the Inside, Sugarland
9. Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, Solange
10. Viva La Vida, Coldplay
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