Charts Watch: Ice Cube, 'Cars,' Pussycat Dolls

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• Ice Cube's Laugh Now Cry Later, the first album by the former NWA member in over six years, debuted at Number Four with 144,490 sales.

• The soundtrack to Pixar's Cars, featuring a bevy of new and old car-related tunes by Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, Chuck Berry and Rascal Flatts, entered the charts in the Top 10 with 68,387 sales its first week out.

• Gnarls Barkley's Star Wars-inspired performance of their hit "Crazy" at the MTV Movie Awards earned them a 32 percent jump in sales for a grand total of 216,466 sales over five weeks.

• Thirty-nine weeks after its release, everyone's favorite former burlesque act, the Pussycat Dolls, remained high on the charts thanks to their latest single "Buttons," a duet with Snoop Dogg. Their debut PCD has sold a total of 1,617,909 copies.

• Scottish singer-songwriter K.T. Tunstall has been making a slow steady rise up the charts since releasing her debut Eye To The Telescope 18 weeks ago, selling 391,838 units total.

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  MUSIC 100 Greatest Debut Albums
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  MOVIES 'This Is the End' Brings the Goods
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  TV The Women of 'Mad Men'
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  POLITICS No Price Big Banks Can't Fix

Song Stories

“Everyday People”

Sly and the Family Stone | 1968

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.

More Song Stories entries »

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