Rock: Rebounds on the Charts

The rap-tinged metal of Limp Bizkit and a novelty hit by Pearl Jam have put rock music atop both the nation’s album and singles charts for the first time this year.

Limp Bizkit’s “Significant Other,” the second collection from the Florida band, sold 635,000 copies its first week in stores, the best single-week performance by a hard-rock act since Metallica’s “Load” sold 680,000 in 1996.

Pearl Jam, meanwhile, has the No. 1 single with “Last Kiss,” its version of the 1964 hit by J. Frank Wilson & the Cavaliers. “Last Kiss” is the first No. 1 rock single since Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” last summer.

The Limp Bizkit debut was strong enough to unseat the Backstreet Boys, whose “Millennium” held the No. 1 spot for five weeks and set a single-week sales record of 1.13 million copies, according to SoundScan. Limp Bizkit’s sound--thrash metal with swaggering rap accents--sets it apart from most of the other hit albums this year. The charts have been dominated by youth pop, rap and R&B;, prompting a chorus of critics to cite the end of rock’s reign as the linchpin genre of pop music.

“I think all that is premature,” says Geoff Mayfield, director of charts for Billboard magazine. “[Rock groups] have not been this conspicuous on the chart but they haven’t been anemic either.”

Still, of the 24 albums that have sold a million copies or more this year, only four--by the Offspring, Everlast, Sugar Ray and Korn--get airplay on rock radio stations.

The rest of this week’s Top 5 albums are, respectively, “Ricky Martin” and the soundtracks to “Wild Wild West” and “Tarzan.”