Royce Da 5’9″ Says, “Bye Rihanna” Unsets Pop/R&B Star As Number One R&B/Hip-Hop Album In The Country

It’s been a long time coming for Detroit emcee Royce Da 5’9″, but the Shady Records, Slaughterhouse, Bad Meets Evil & PRhyme rep finally has his first #1 album on the Billboard charts.  It took 20 years, but Royce finally came in at the #1 spot on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart with his latest album, Layers, which effectively unset pop starlet Rihanna’s latest album, ANTI.

Layers, which dropped April 15th, sold a total of 16,719 albums in it’s first week on the charts and sits at #22 on the overall Billboard 200 charts.  This isn’t the first time that Royce has hit #1 on the charts, as he also did with his Bad Meets Evil groupmate Eminem, for their seminal debut EP, Hell: The Sequel, which hit #1 in 2011 and has gone on to get a Gold certification with over 800,000 albums sold.  This is the first time that Nickel has done so for his solo work though and not only for his solo work, but on his own label, Bad Half Entertainment.

As Royce has put out his previous work with Bad Meets Evil and his group Slaughterhouse, through Shady Records.  Layers, as put by him is an album about the different layers of the life and art of Royce Da 5’9″, whether through Bad Meets Evil, Slaughterhouse or even his most recent group PRhyme to finally bring you what Royce now is as a solo artist.

Royce told Forbes from a recent tour stop in Vancouver how good it felt that his hard work is finally paying off too.

“It feels great, like hard work is paying off.  You get out of it what you put into it and I gave it my all and focused on just music.”

It’s quite fitting that Royce knock off Rihanna first his first #1 too, as he name checked her in a flirting way at the BET Hip-Hop Awards Cypher in 2011, as part of the Shady 2.0 cypher.  Nearly 5 years after his infamous, “Hi, Rihanna” line, he has now offset her on the Billboard albums charts.