For the first time in five years, I lost sleep attending Pop Conference. At the University of Southern California campuscolleagues gathered over three days to deliver presentations based on the theme of collections and archives. I wrote a paper on the history of the greatest hits called “Reissue, Repackage, Reevaluate!” The text is below. I did not post a photo of a shirtless Glenn Frey for fear of scaring roaches.
NB: I write these things to be delivered orally.
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The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti once called the sonnet “a moment’s monument.” Regard the greatest hits compilation as several monumentalized moments, or as a moment preserved as a monument, a testament to an act’s efflorescence, however brief, however long. Buyers born before, say, 2000 will remember opening a Rolling Stone or Newsweek and gawking at the ads for Columbia House and BMG. Fifty-eight CDs for a penny! Nothing more to buy ever! Among the illustrations of Dave Matthews Band, Mary J. Blige, and Soundgarden sleeves were CCR’s Chronicle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits, Madonna’s The Immaculate Collection.
For decades a guaranteed income stream for artists and labels, the greatest hits compilation was an essential component in discographies. Single-friendly acts and genres could present their tastiest fare at a nice price, suitable for consumption on a LP, 8-track, cassette, or compact disc. Often considered the first compilation, Johnny’s Greatest Hits was a model of efficiency: a dozen tracks spread across 32 minutes. Until Dark Side of the Moon, which whatever else prized its conceptual integrity like Roger Waters did his narrative skills , Johnny Mathis’ comp squatted on the Billboard album chart longer than any album to date: a collection of makeout inferno symphoies for a generation of parents who still believed in necking.
Technological advances affect the development of a form as well as their birth. If the rise of a leisure class and the newspaper led to the English novel in the late eighteenth century, then the physical limitations of the classic vinyl LP memorialized its aesthetic reach in the 20th. This resulted in the first so-called concept albums, released by Frank Sinatra in the mid ‘50s, and popularized by a new generation a decade later when the Beach Boys and the Beatles deepened Sinatra’s fealty to mood and gestalt. Thanks to hundreds of cheapo editions the greatest hits compilation of the late ‘60s even great ones had the air of a dilettante’s purchase: the sort of thing you’d buy your sister’s boyfriend for Christmas because you heard he liked “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” Call them less respectable siblings if you like.
As the pop and rock audiences started to fracture alongside the putative liberal consensus in the late ‘60s, the compilation became a bouquet of roses, a tribute to a job well done. 1971 alone saw the release of three epochal collections: Aretha’s Greatest Hits, The Who’s Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, and the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks. Obviously these artists’ careers hadn’t ended–in the case of the Stones it will never end–but there was a sense in which a new decade required memorializing a previous one. With the following year’s Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits the comp became serious business: although never peaking at #1, this collection of zeitgeist-defining singles turned into one of the best-selling of all time.
Should our planet survive a series of impending catastrophes, I hope anthropologists will explain the enduring popularity of Their Greatest Hits: 1971-1975. By mid-decade the Eagles were undeniable but nothing so far signaled that this comp would spend the ensuing four decades duking it out with Thriller to become the best-selling album in American history, though I’m sure there are weirdos who have pitted “One of these Nights” against “Billie Jean” or “Witchy Woman” against “Beat It.”
As the ‘80s dawned the industry practice of releasing compilations that summarized an act’s career to date, or, if you’re feeling unkind, erecting a tombstone to that act’s career persisted. Some acts kept their marketing shrewdness: Kenny Rogers’ Greatest Hits caught the country bizzer at the apogee of his Urban Cowboy crossover success while signaling a career move with the inclusion of the newly recorded “Lady” written and produced by Lionel Richie. Others like Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits—Volume I & II spared no expense as clearing houses: a double-disc collection whose posh liner notes and black and white photography adduced Joel’s intentions to join the ranks of Gershwin and Cole Porter; he paid for an ampersand in the title!
Functioning as an introduction to white American listeners who if they’d heard reggae at all it was thanks to Eric Clapton’s excretions and, if they had the dough, a Club Med lounge act, Legend joined Joel and Rogers’ compilations as the decade’s best-selling: 15 times platinum in the U.S. alone. As numbing as “One Love” and “Jammin’’ may sound to us now, thank the stickiness of Bob Marley’s tunes: his ability to sweeten a declarative statement or a tagline first into prayer then into protest. In a manner that I hope doesn’t sound cynical, Legend and the posters of Bob Marley’s dreadlocked visage in dorm rooms across the land well into the ‘90s complemented each other. Ubiquity had a sound and a face.
Besotted with the single as discrete object, the British took packaging a step further: where the Smiths had once assembled 1987’s definitive Louder Than Bombs comp out of A- and b-sides and outtakes, now, say, Suede and Pet Shop Boys could release double-disc b-side comps without objections, not when these examples of decadence boasted liner notes and such. Let’s make lots of money!
Speaking of the Brits, the rise of college rock during the 1980s, pushed the occasional MTV crossover into the American top forty, but it took a spate of steadily selling, later totemic compilations. Catching Up with Depeche Mode, Songs to Learn and Sing, Standing on the Beach—to see these titles is to re-envisage an era when DM, Echo & The Bunnymen, and The Cure represented a break from Mr. Mister and Starship. These compilations were for the first time oppositional; they were statements of alternative listening politics. With its emphasis on the big beat and synthesizer tricks, mid to late ‘80s American pop music snuck back the disco hints it had spent a half decade treating like roadkill. Perhaps this helped Substance break New Order in the United States. Proceeding in trad chronological order but eschewing album mixes for the 12” ones, this 1987 comp acted as a guide map for fusing post-punk guitar, amiably wan vocals, and increasingly sophisticated electronic syncopations—here was, to quote Bob Christgau, the greatest disco act since Chic (whose early ‘90s two-disc Rhino comp proved equally epochal for many of us!).
When record companies won their war against first vinyl then the cassette tape with the compact disc, they also won a propaganda war: those who owned Elton John’s 1974 Greatest Hits and Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975), to name a couple random examples, could own them a second time digitally on a purportedly immortal format (all that’s immortal is record company greed). It’s not that we preferred CD’s; it’s that we were left with no choice. This resulted in the purchasing of albums we already owned on pesky old vinyl and shitty newer cassette; it also resulted in labels, eyeing the CD’s extra space, larding newer comps with obscurer singles, recognizable album tracks, alternative takes, and B-sides.
Fortunately this era produced two future jukebox heroes. Garnished with two readymade smashes and its tracks reworked in the trendy QSound to guarantee they’d sound like garbage within a month of its release, The Immaculate Collection proved both a handy distillation of Madonna’s prowess and a frustratingly truncated listen – where were “Angel,” “Who’s That Girl?” and “Causing a Commotion”? Nevertheless it became Madonna’s second best-selling album. The recipient of unfair cavils about his ability to sustain a long-playing side’s interest, Tom Petty implicitly yielded to his critics with 1993’s Greatest Hits, which promptly outsold those studio albums combined and whose “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” became one of the rare new songs grafted to a comp that joined his classics.
One phenomenon associated with the compilation is the way in which steadily accumulating sales shook the dust from legacy acts or gave marginal ones the heft of major ones. Think Van Morrison’s 1990 The Best of Van Morrison. Few listeners were buying his post-1979 output, even though I’d posit a couple of his ‘80s albums as beautiful ambient music with unexpected dissonances. Although never climbing higher than #41 in America, The Best of sold four million copies by 2002 and probably been streamed millions of times, as anyone who’s heard “Moondance” or “Brown Eyed Girl” in public before. Best known for a couple of peppy karaoke favorites and their presence on the then-burgeoning modern rock radio chart, Erasure came across as masters of the single on 1992’s Pop! The First Twenty Hits; even during the height of the grunge era I’d spot this comp in an acquaintance’s library beside Green Day and Smashing Pumpkins. At the time it disturbed and reassured, like when John Lydon admitted he loved ABBA.
Some acts in the ‘90s showed their contempt for the greatest hits as a loose, baggy monster by not showing up for them. A double disc insta-classic pulled from circulation after Garth Brooks made clear he liked albums, man, 1994’s The Hits has become as rare as a two-dollar bill: unavailable as Brooks’ catalog on streaming services, used physical copies start at $31 on Amazon. His posture might look more principled had he not yanked The Hits after the RIAA certified it 10-times-platinum. Meanwhile the best-selling hip-hop compilation in America, also certified diamond, came out two years after 2Pac Shakur’s unexpected death and like Marley’s Legend kept going and going.
Guaranteed to keep going so long as it appealed to—exploited—a generation’s fathomless self-obsession, the Beatles Industry released its third putatively comprehensive set in a new millennium. Beatles 1 did become an all-timer, though, beating expectations to become the best-selling album of its decade and the fourth-best-selling album of the Soundscan era—and this was before the Billboard chart counted streams. Besides exposing kids to the horrors of “Hello Goodbye,” 1 did much to replenish the coffers of an ailing George Harrison, who succumbed to cancer almost a year to the day of its release.
Researchers more fervent than me have written how a Herndon, VA punk named Sean Parker changed how we buy music; iTunes and later Spotify changed how we listen to it. For the purposes of this presentation I scanned release dates for compilations released after 2001 whose impact on the act’s career mattered, for want of a better word, like it did for many of the acts I’ve named.
Pink proved the truth of her optimistically titled Greatest Hits…So Far!!! by watching its pair of new tracks peak in the top two, including one #1, and by reveling in a career that has seen no abrupt lurches in her next decade.
Spoon’s 2019 Everything Hits at Once was a self-conscious throwback to the days of Standing on the Beach released at the height of the streaming era, though leader Britt Daniel might have had another throwback in mind: the good old fashioned contract fulfillment release.
Because, really, who needs them? The exigencies of contemporary listening habits have vitiated the need for comps. Why spend $15 when you can create your own Tupac or, god help us, Eagles album track playlist? Or by bunching YouTube videos together? In whatever order you want? After all, some of my favorite compilations cop to no ideas of order or gestalt. To listen to Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 and its mix of album tracks, singles, and never-released oddities is to get a peak at the congeries of influences a-swirl in his imagination. Neil Young’s Decade, released when he had wandered the farthest afield from the amiable blandishments of his early success, offers a similar tumult. Here’s my grab bag of stuff, the artists said. Order is for wimps. The Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks 1964-1971 and Luther Vandross’ The Best of Luther…The Best of Love offer chronological order but similar miscellanies (by the way: the confidence—the arrogance—of the latter delights me. Luther IS Love).
The compilation is an anachronism precisely because its creators unwittingly peaked into the future: it predicted the conditions by which it would be rendered obsolete. Record companies gave us the illusion of choice; with the playlist we got it.
Humanizing The Vacuum 