Nearly every greatest hits collection has a problem.
Problems arise owing to constraints. There’s the high-level constraint, of course—how to pick favorite tracks. And some collections get this wrong! But there are constraints beyond this, too. There were the different labels jockeying for influence over an artist’s discography, the artist’s own (sometimes wrong-headed) preferences, the 80-minute duration of the CD format.
When I was growing up, this stew of constraints resulted in a strange mix of greatest hits collections:
- The abbreviated hits, missing key songs or even eras of an artist’s career.
- The hits plus bonus tracks, including preferred album tracks (not hits!) or—far worse—new songs.
- The unnecessary greatest hits, for the one- or two-hit wonders out there. I had a Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs greatest hits CD that had no business existing. (All you need is “Wooly Bully.”)
- The volume collection, one of several if the artist has a long enough career.
- The artist’s single successful album plus a few other songs collection, for a band like Boston, where all you really need is the self-titled debut plus “Don’t Look Back” and “Amanda.”
These are all understandable. The worst offenders for me, though, were the greatest hits collections packaged under some sort of theme. Those include:
- The “number ones” collection, where—save for a few extraordinary artists like The Beatles—involves creatively interpreting what “number one” means. Besides the skewing of context, these collections are frustrating for what they don’t include, often overlooking beloved tracks that made it nowhere near the #1 position on any chart.
- The listicle greatest hits, where the track count needs to reach a certain number. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Thyrty manages to be both a painful joke and a bit overstuffed for a band whose meaningful output panned only five studio albums of 40 total songs.
Of course, the streaming era has ended any need for a greatest hits collection. Spotify and other services have preset playlists of greatest hits, presumably based on listener data. What use do we have for the oddball constraints (and excesses) of the greatest hits collections of the CD era?
Not much, I’d say. But I will miss the oddity.
Taylor Coe 