The Essential Ultimate Greatest Top Best Of All-Time Collection
Are collections a boon or bane? I've been pondering this a bit lately, mulling it over, turning it about in my mind, so to speak. Last week Billy Bragg released Must I Paint You a Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg, a first ever "career retrospective." For me, Bragg has always been someone to enjoy on college radio and to borrow from college roommates. So I'm not a huge fan (I do have the two Mermaid Ave discs, and an nice old Peel Sessions CD that Strange Fruit released back in the early nineties. It's an eighties-greatest-hits-played-poorly collection), but I liked enough of the singles over the years to want to pick this up. I did, and ... it's too long. You would think a 20 year career would have enough for a 40 song set, and yet, you would be wrong. There would be songs missing off a one CD hits collection, but it makes me wonder. In the light of Billy Bragg, or the recent yet-another-repackaging of The Eagles (this time it's The Very Best of The Eagles; 2 CD's and 33 songs. The Greatest Hits was only 10 songs, and Greatest Hits vol. 2 was another 10. Mathematically, there are 13 of their Very Best that were not Great Hits. So is Don Henley blaming the record company for these 13 failures, or what? I guess when you can live off the residuals paid by car commercials you don't have to care anymore. This is a rather long parenthetical side-trip, but I would be remiss if I failed to get in a jab at Don Henley/Glenn Frey and the assorted other Eagle wankers), are the rash of Ultimate and Essential Collections a plague or a gift to fans everywhere?
I'm not going to argue that artists should or should not put out collections. After a certain career point, there needs to be a good introduction and starting point. For an artist such as Bob Dylan, collections that focus on covering a span of time are crucial - if you look at the track list of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, it's ten tracks everyone knows. A true greatest hits from his first 7 albums. In 2000, Columbia released The Essential Bob Dylan, a nice two disc set that covers forty years in 30 songs. 24 of the songs are from the first 14 years of his career. The summation of the final twenty-six years is six songs, only two of which are from the last 11 years. I'm sure Dylan doesn't feel that these recordings, that comprise the bulk of his career, are less "essential". At least Bragg chose his set, and is responsible for the flotsam and jetsam that litters the two discs. And the idea that Bragg has more essential songs than Dylan is both farcical and ludicrous (not just one or the other).
Still I am torn. I like the Essential collections - the Johnny Cash one is a great companion to Love/God/Murder, which was Cash's chosen career retrospective. The Leonard Cohen double disc - chosen by the sartorial sage himself (can't you just see him, standing barefoot in black slacks and a black turtleneck, hand on grizzled chin, looking at his albums spread across the floor as so many i-ching sticks, pondering whether to include the original or live version of "Dance Me to the End of Love"? Okay, maybe not) is great - it allows you to see the evolution, the steps and missteps along the way. I don't feel I need another Cohen album.
And that's the problem. Leonard Cohen has chosen a collection that makes every single other album irrelevant to me. I have no need for back catalog whatsoever. The same is true with so many of these Essential collections. Willie Nelson? Check. Stevie Ray Vaughan? Check. Earth, Wind & Fire? Check. I hate to say it, but for most people, The Essential Clash and the Essential Sly & The Family Stone will be more than enough. Two discs of Kenny Loggins? Well, it does have the Loggins & Messina masterpieces. Even the 20th Century Masters and Ultimate collections are often enough. I'm still waiting for somebody to buy me Black 'N' Blue's Ultimate Collection so I can think of Kyle as I rock out to "Bombastic Plastic."
So do these collections serve the best interest of the artist or the consumer, both, or neither? I won't buy any back catalog from Leonard Cohen or Billy Bragg. But would I have otherwise? Doubtful, but I eventually might have decided, "Damn it, I need to hear 'Tower of Song' or the full band version of 'She's Got a New Spell'." (If anyone knows if Springsteen ever fulfilled my spring dream, I'd love to know) It's a tough question, one I toss around and around and seem to never satisfy myself with an answer.
I'm not going to argue that artists should or should not put out collections. After a certain career point, there needs to be a good introduction and starting point. For an artist such as Bob Dylan, collections that focus on covering a span of time are crucial - if you look at the track list of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, it's ten tracks everyone knows. A true greatest hits from his first 7 albums. In 2000, Columbia released The Essential Bob Dylan, a nice two disc set that covers forty years in 30 songs. 24 of the songs are from the first 14 years of his career. The summation of the final twenty-six years is six songs, only two of which are from the last 11 years. I'm sure Dylan doesn't feel that these recordings, that comprise the bulk of his career, are less "essential". At least Bragg chose his set, and is responsible for the flotsam and jetsam that litters the two discs. And the idea that Bragg has more essential songs than Dylan is both farcical and ludicrous (not just one or the other).
Still I am torn. I like the Essential collections - the Johnny Cash one is a great companion to Love/God/Murder, which was Cash's chosen career retrospective. The Leonard Cohen double disc - chosen by the sartorial sage himself (can't you just see him, standing barefoot in black slacks and a black turtleneck, hand on grizzled chin, looking at his albums spread across the floor as so many i-ching sticks, pondering whether to include the original or live version of "Dance Me to the End of Love"? Okay, maybe not) is great - it allows you to see the evolution, the steps and missteps along the way. I don't feel I need another Cohen album.
And that's the problem. Leonard Cohen has chosen a collection that makes every single other album irrelevant to me. I have no need for back catalog whatsoever. The same is true with so many of these Essential collections. Willie Nelson? Check. Stevie Ray Vaughan? Check. Earth, Wind & Fire? Check. I hate to say it, but for most people, The Essential Clash and the Essential Sly & The Family Stone will be more than enough. Two discs of Kenny Loggins? Well, it does have the Loggins & Messina masterpieces. Even the 20th Century Masters and Ultimate collections are often enough. I'm still waiting for somebody to buy me Black 'N' Blue's Ultimate Collection so I can think of Kyle as I rock out to "Bombastic Plastic."
So do these collections serve the best interest of the artist or the consumer, both, or neither? I won't buy any back catalog from Leonard Cohen or Billy Bragg. But would I have otherwise? Doubtful, but I eventually might have decided, "Damn it, I need to hear 'Tower of Song' or the full band version of 'She's Got a New Spell'." (If anyone knows if Springsteen ever fulfilled my spring dream, I'd love to know) It's a tough question, one I toss around and around and seem to never satisfy myself with an answer.
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