Janet's mention of Chicago IX in the comments to my last entry made me think of greatest hits albums today. Lots of hardcore music geeks seem to hate best-of albums because the songs are "out of context" or whatever, but I love them! They're ideal for bands like Chicago who had a handful of decent songs spread throughout their career, but never made a great album.Greatest hits albums make good "gateways" for checking new artists out, since they provide all the best songs in one place, and a few of them make great starting and ending points. Off the top of my iPod, here are some of the greatest hits compilations in regular rotation for me.
- Abba - Gold
- David Bowie - ChangesBowie
- Buzzcocks - Singles Going Steady
- CCR - Chronicle, Volume 1
- Donovan - Greatest Hits
- The Hollies - Greatest Hits
- Bob Marley - Legend
- Sly & The Family Stone - Greatest Hits
- Squeeze - Singles 45's and Under
- T. Rex - T. Rextasy
When I was a younger music geek, the only records available by CCR, Donovan, the Byrds, the Hollies, Sly & the Family Stone, and all the other old schoolers were their greatest hits albums. These collections are like old friends from my childhood. The Buzzcocks and Squeeze comps were some of my first forays into "new wave". T. Rextasy (long out of print) is the only T. Rex comp that has their pre and post Electric Warrior output in one place. And everyone in the world owns a copy of Abba Gold -- I think it's required by law!
I'm also fond of the "greatest hits" from Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books about albums. They've put out Volume 2 just in time for the holidays. The 33 1/3 books (pocket sized paperbacks where someone expounds about an album) retail for $9.95 each, which seems a bit overpriced for something you can read in the time it takes to listen to the album. The "greatest hits" (with the best bits from 20 individual books) only costs $10.85 for five times the word count. They also give excerpts from all the recent 33 1/3 books to help readers decide which books might be good and which ones might be bad. They're like literary mix tapes.
4 comments:
Greatest hits albums make good "gateways" for checking new artists out, since they provide all the best songs in one place, and a few of them make great starting and ending points.
I would argue about the validity of Singles Going Steady appearing on a list of standard "Greatest Hits" albums, since only two of the songs on it appeared on actual Buzzcocks albums. A lot of their best songs were on those albums.
There are a lot of "greatest hits" albums full of songs that didn't appear on albums by the artists: The Beatles 1, the Stones Hot Rocks. "Greatest hits" and "best songs" are two different animals.
So I decided to borrow Chicago IX from the library for the time being. Good thing too - it seems their strategy for being so prolific was to record a whole lot of songs that sounded the same. Guess I didn't notice at the time. Well, I still love "Wishing You Were Here".
Some previous user had stolen or destroyed the inserts in the library copy, so I couldn't even enjoy the woman with the cleaver.
I like greatest-hits albums. I am lazy.
The sad thing about ABBA Gold is that, even though it's a greatest hits album, you still have to whittle it down quite a bit in order to make it listenable (remove all ballads except "Fernando", all songs sung by Benny, and "Dancing Queen" [OK, that last one's probably just me]).
On the other hand, the remaining tracks are pretty spectacular.
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