A nation of old heads cries in its Budweiser

There's a reason why this gremlin is smiling, and it's not because he just found some cocaine in his pocket he didn't realize was there. No, it's because Lil Wayne's new album, Tha Carter III, just sold a million copies its first week out.

It was the first album to sell more than a million copies in a week since Fiddy Cent's The Massacre, way the fuck back in 2005. No albums reached such a plateau in either 2006 or 2007. The closest was Kanye West's Graduation, which sold something like 950,000 copies its first week out, last year.

To think, people were saying Tha Carter III might sell in the neighborhood of 400,000 copies, last week. Then there were reports it might do damn near as well as Graduation. Then, this weekend, they were saying it might actually crack 1 million sales mark in a week. And now it has.

Which begs the question: How in the fuck did this happen? Of all the rap albums that could have been this successful, why did it have to be Lil Wayne? How come it couldn't have been the new One Be Lo?

Is it because there's more than twice as many people in Generation Y than there are us Gen Xers? That's a fact, you know. I read it the other day in, I think, Newsweek. We just plain don't have the numbers on our side.

I shudder to think what's gonna happen once the TIs figure out what forces are at play here and manage to repeat Lil Wayne's success with someone who could even be worse. (Hey, it could happen!)

After the jump is a brief clip of Lil Wayne on MTV talking about how elated he is. You know why he's all grinning and shit, right? Because he's about to go buy some drugs.