Kendrick Lamar's 'Black Panther' Soundtrack Tops Billboard Chart
As record-breaking numbers put Marvel’s “Black Panther” at the top of the box office, the film’s Kendrick Lamar-produced soundtrack has followed suit, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
The 14-track “Black Panther: The Album,” which dropped Feb. 9, collected 93,000 streaming equivalent album units in its first week. It moved another 52,000 units in traditional album sales. The album is the second soundtrack in 2018 to debut at No. 1 after “The Greatest Showman” did so in January.
In January, “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler announced Kendrick would team up with label executive Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith to produce and curate an album for the movie. The result was a hip-hop-focused soundtrack, teeming with celebrity features.
The first single, “All the Stars” with K. Dot and SZA, sits at 31 on the charts. The Weeknd also appears on the album with Kendrick in “Pray for Me,” which debuted in the top 5 Hot Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart. Khalid, James Blake and Anderson .Paak are also featured on the soundtrack.
The film itself grossed $192 million over the weekend including Thursday night early showings, making it the fifth-highest opening for any film. It was an international success as well, earning $370.5 million in the global debut.
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Ryan Coogler
“You see media that can make you feel ashamed to be African. They can make it feel like it’s a shameful thing,” Coogler said. “I think it’s not. For me, the biggest thing on this was making this awesome, globe-trotting political thriller that just happens to be about Africans. It’s the best way to accomplish that goal and that’s what Marvel was interested in doing — that’s what I was interested in doing.”
Hannah Beachler
"I drew from a lot of different places, I think, and keeping the tradition involved in the aesthetic and the design language was of the utmost importance, because it’s about black representation, the black future and agency using architecture and history and science and myth and biomimetics, and biomorphosis, and all of that went into the design," she told Film School Rejects.
Joe Robert Cole
“For so long there was a limited pool of people who had the opportunity to tell stories so that limited the perspective of the story being told. I think there is a fatigue with that perspective,” Cole told The Guardian. “This is a movie that steps out of that in an amazing way. There’s a hunger for new lenses on the world, new ways of seeing stories. We spoke from our perspective."
Ruth E. Carter
![Carter, a legendary costume designer who's worked on dozens of classic films, is the mastermind behind the film's wardrobe. She found inspiration from tribes on the continent -- including the Maasai, the Dogon and the Chakana -- and put an Afrofuturistic twist on the costumes. <br /><br />"We wanted to honor [culture and tradition] in this futuristic way and a lot of the details of the indigenous African tribes easily translate into a futuristic model so that part of it was super fun to do and it was like no one had even really thought of it like that," she told HuffPost.](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/72kBoRyZto0FRhStyY.WqQ--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/5a838e211e00002c007ab9d6.jpeg?ops=crop_0_48_2831_2185)
"We wanted to honor [culture and tradition] in this futuristic way and a lot of the details of the indigenous African tribes easily translate into a futuristic model so that part of it was super fun to do and it was like no one had even really thought of it like that," she told HuffPost.
Nate Moore
"There's such an underserved population of people just aching for positive images of themselves on screen," he said. "In this case, obviously the African-American and African communities seeing representations like T'Challa and Nakia and Okoye and all these great characters in the context of doing good and being heroic is valuable because those images don't exist that much. And so I think and I hope this movie can be a watershed to see other films like this."
Douriean Fletcher
"Ruth liked what I consider to be an ancient yet futuristic aesthetic and with her understanding of my skill set, creativity, innovation and work ethic, she saw it fit for me to take on such a critical role for this project," she told the Los Angeles Sentinel.
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
