Celebrity is the third and final studio album by American boy band NSYNC. It was released on July 18, 2001 by Jive Records. The album was the band's second to debut at number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 1,879,495 copies, the second best debut-week sales in the country at the time, only behind its predecessor No Strings Attached and also becoming their third consecutive top ten album in the United States. As of 2015, the album has the third best-debut week sales in the US of all time.[2] Upon release, the album received generally positive reviews from music critics.
Background
At the 2000 Billboard Music Awards on December 5, 2000, NSYNC announced that they would begin "experimenting with new music" for their fourth studio album in January 2001 at a recording studio in their native Florida. Justin Timberlake revealed that they plan to spend two months there to "see what [they] can come up with", while Joey Fatone stated that the group may "move out of state" as the project progresses. NSYNC revealed that they while they plan to do more songwriting and producing for the album, they hope to work with Kevin "She'kspere" Briggs and Richard Marx, who had collaborated with them on their third studio album, No Strings Attached (2000). Fatone said that working with Marx was "such a cool feeling", as the singer was someone that he had listened to when he was younger and "looked up to".[3]
The group sought to express more creative control on the album than they did with their previous work.[4] As such, the album features more songwriting and production from the group's members than any of their previous albums.
Promotion
A television special entitled The Road To Celebrity was broadcast on MTV from July 21 to 22, 2001.[5] The album spawned three singles: "Pop", "Gone" and "Girlfriend". which peaked at numbers nineteen, eleven and five on the Billboard Hot 100 respectively.
The band embarked on two tours to promote the album. The first one was PopOdyssey, which began in May 2001 and concluded in September. Earning over $90 million, it was one of the biggest tours of 2001.[6] The second tour was the Celebrity Tour, which began in March 2002 and conclded in April. It earned nearly $30 million.[7]
Celebrity received generally positive reviews from contemporary music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 65 based on 11 reviews.[14] Upon the album's release, Allmusic senior editor, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, gave the album 4.5 stars out of 5, writing that Celebrity is NSYNC's "most varied album yet, but the emergence of Timberlake and Chasez as credible soulful singers and, yes, songwriters makes it their best album yet, and one of the best of the teen pop boom of 1999-2001".[9]
Commercial performance
In the United States, Celebrity debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Although it did not sell as much as its predecessor, Celebrity still managed to gain the second-best debut-week sales at the time since SoundScan began monitoring record retailers in 1991, selling 1,879,955 copies.[15] On August 22, 2001, the album was certified five-time Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting five million shipments. The album also debuted at number one in Canada by selling 71,245 copies.[15]
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