It’s pure bliss for Chesney

KENNY CHESNEY, the country singer who was forced to sing a chorus of A-N-N-U-L-M-E-N-T when his brief marriage to actress Renee Zellweger was dissolved in September, got some good news Wednesday to help offset the pain of that experience as well as his shutout at this year’s annual Country Music Assn. Awards.

Chesney’s new album, “The Road and the Radio,” crushed the competition during its first week of release, including the highly anticipated new CD from rapper 50 Cent, selling 469,000 copies to top the national sales chart. It’s his second No. 1 debut this year, following “Be as You Are: Songs From an Old Blue Chair,” which entered the chart in the top slot in February on sales of 311,000. “The Road and the Radio” came up short of his best first-week figure, 551,000 for his 2004 album “When the Sun Goes Down.”

The soundtrack to 50 Cent’s semiautobiographical film, “Get Rich or Die Tryin’,” sold 317,000 copies to land at No. 2, far short of the 1 million first-week figure some record industry sources had speculated it might achieve. Some have suggested that hip-hop fans had taken a more skeptical view of the project because it so closely parallels Eminem’s “8 Mile” soundtrack 1-2 punch three years ago.

Neil Diamond’s career rebounded strongly with his new Rick Rubin-produced album, “12 Songs,” which sold 93,000 copies to debut at No. 4. The only other new album in the Top 10 is Floetry’s “Flo’ology,” which reached No. 7 on sales of 77,000 according to Nielsen SoundScan.