Kanye West Crushes 50 Cent On the Charts

The race is over, and it wasn't even close.

Kanye West sold a staggering 957,000 copies of his 'Graduation' CD last week, according to Neilsen Soundscan, squashing rival 50 Cent, whose 'Curtis' CD sold a respectable but inferior 691,000 copies. The hip-hop titans were embroiled in a friendly battle of words and egos for weeks leading up the Sept. 11 release of their albums, with Fiddy even saying that he would retire if Kanye outsold him. Not only did West win the rap war, he also scored the highest first-week sales of any artist so far this year, topping Linkin Park, who sold 623,000 copies of their 'Minutes to Midnight' CD in May.

"To be a champion, you've got to take out a champion," gloated West to an all-star crowd at GQ's 50th anniversary party hours after his victory was declared. Moments later, he called for his "theme music," then launched into a performance of his new single 'The Good Life.'

"It feels overwhelming," West told the Associated Press earlier in the day. "Everyone is coming up to me and telling me how proud they are of me."

Fiddy may be eating his words a little, but with a world tour in the works, and the second-highest debut of the year under his belt, we doubt he'll be putting down his mic any time soon. "I am very excited to have participated in one of the biggest album release weeks in the last two years," he said in a statement yesterday. "Collectively, we have sold hundreds of thousands of units in our debut week. This marks a great moment for hip-hop music, one that will go down in history."

"I think it's great," echoed Diddy, who partied with Kanye at the GQ event along with Jay-Z and Beyonce. "They made it fun. A lot of things in hip-hop have been sold on negativity, but they kept it a positive thing. But I'll plead the 5th on [who's side I was on]. I like to keep the peace. That's wise in the world of hip-hop."