Darker side of Greatest Hits albums

The winter months are a lovely time of year: Christmas lights illuminate the night, hot… The winter months are a lovely time of year: Christmas lights illuminate the night, hot chocolate becomes nearly as popular as cheap beer and snowball fights are the law of the land.

The holiday season must be particularly pleasant for over-the-hill bands, too. Each winter, many of these musical acts which haven’t released a good song in half a decade magically reappear on the shelves of Wal-Marts and Circuit Cities across the country. Their albums are called Greatest Hits, and they are more numerous this time of year than mullets at a Kid Rock concert.

Now, I’m a huge fan of greatest hits collections; they are chock-full of good songs and serve several purposes. The first is to give the fan a retrospective view of the band’s work throughout its career. Being a gigantic nerd, I love listening to a band’s work chronologically and trying to figure out what influenced them to change.

Secondly, these albums prevent casual fans from having to buy a band’s full catalog to obtain all the songs they are familiar with. I mean, every Britney Spears hit on one record and no album filler!? You can’t lose!

While the positive aspects are fairly substantial and have convinced me to buy more than a few (there is no way I would buy several Journey albums just to have “Any Way You Want It” and “Don’t Stop Believin'”), there’s a seedy underbelly to the Best Of world.

Greatest hits collections should be created for the fans – they make great gifts for someone just getting interested in a band. But too often, the obvious truth is that these albums are made just so some old, already-too-rich rock stars can make more money.

To some extent, that’s fine with me; I mean, these guys are out to make a buck just like anyone else. Plus, once a band has released more than, say, three albums worth of original music, it’s not unreasonable to believe that it will be more financially effective to put all the best songs on one album.

Really, my problem lies with just a few bands, and right now those bands are Aerosmith and U2. Both acts have been around for a very, very long time, and both have released more than enough music to warrant a greatest hits collection.

But why is it that we currently sit less than a month before Christmas of 2006 and I feel like it’s 2002? Well, maybe it’s because that was also a year when both bands of suave businessmen released a Best Of Collection.

Interestingly enough, with this month’s release of U2’s U218: Singles and Aerosmith’s Devil’s Got a New Disguise: The Very Best of Aerosmith, the bands have put out four and – get this – 11 greatest hits albums, respectively.

Before I rant about how both of these groups are money-hungry and way, way, way past their prime, I should give them the benefit of the doubt. Let’s look at U2 first.

While these guys seemingly made a conscious effort to no longer be a good band in 1993 (with the exception of the song “Beautiful Day”), they have, in fact, released successful singles that could squirm their way on to a greatest hits record.

But considering U2 has already put out a two-part hits collection, each covering a decade, there is only one album – the band’s, ahem, less than stellar How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb – as well as two new songs, one with Green Day (for shame, Billie Joe, for shame), not already represented on a compilation. Shouldn’t these guys wait a little longer before throwing a new hits collection at us? Well, hey, Bono is a politician now, so he’s surely mastered the art of duping the public.

The real culprits here are the all-American boys of Aerosmith. These chaps put out their first hits collection in 1980, so it goes without saying that by 2006 they would have enough material to piece together a new one.

But, alas, the band released its last album of original music in 2001, and put out a greatest hits in 2002