CHART PREVIEW: R. KELLY, MISSY ELLIOTT LOOKING AT TOP TWO

In case anyone besides us is keeping track, it looks like this week’s chart is coming together just like we told you last week.

That means that nutty, koo-koo R. Kelly’s latest assemblage of smoldering sex rhymes, TP.3 Reloaded (Jive), is still on track to make its debut with 500k in first-week sales. That’ll make it #1 two or three times over and one of the biggest chart debuts this year. Looks like all the action around that whole "Trapped in the Closet" quintilogy, or whatever you call it, is paying off bigtime.

As the early number-crunching continues, it also looks like Missy Elliott’s sixth album, The Cookbook (Atlantic), is on track to hit its marks at 160k-170k in first-week sales, which will put it solidly in second place.

Elliott’s hip-hop opus, along with Kelly’s lates, will put R&B and hip-hop at the top of this week’s chart, ahead of the swoon-rock, pop and country of Coldplay, Mariah and George Strait, each of whom are expected to come in this week somewhere between 100k and 130k.

Also coming on the chart this week is Houston rapper Webbie, whose Savage Life (Atlantic) is looking like it’ll have logged 50k-55k by the time the counting’s done. That should land him just outside the Top 10, but you never know. That is to say, we never know. We’re nothing if not honest.