What About Compliations?

Why aren’t there any compilations in The New Top 100? Because this is a list of albums: collections of songs the artists intended to be experienced together.

Because compilations are put together after the fact, they tend to get switched around and reconstituted, and they don’t endure. I remember when the David Bowie compilation ChangesOneBowie was supplemented (changed?) to include “Let’s Dance,” “China Girl,” and “Modern Love,” which made it a much different compilation, though it was still called ChangesOneBowie. Bob Dylan’s great 1960s compilations – Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits and Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 – were effectively superseded by Biography, a more complete collection released in the early 1990s, but with a lot of songs in common with the earlier compilations. Similarly, the Stones’ Through the Past, Darkly and Flowers, two 60s compilations, were rendered obsolete by the boxed set The London Years. All this is a long way of saying that deciding which compilation belongs on a top albums list is chasing your tail.

Rolling Stone magazine disagrees. They include compilations on their top albums list. But it makes them look silly. Consider that the RS list does not include a Beatles compilation, despite the undeniable quality of song after song on the twin compilations 1963-1966 and 1967-1970, not to mention Anthology and the more succinct 1’s. This can’t be because the compilations aren’t good enough. It’s obviously because there are so many great Beatles albums that RS found it unnecessary to include compilations in order to recognize the Fab Four. Bob Marley gets the opposite treatment. RS gives short shrift to the great Marley albums, opting to take the easy way out, and recognize Marley only for his multi-platinum, posthumus compilation Legend.

In fact, if you take a close look, there are almost no artists who make the RS list with both true albums and compilations. We think that’s because critics are biased against the compilations of otherwise represented artists (the Beatles, the Stones, Aretha Franklin), and biased in favor of the compilations of otherwise unrepresented artists (Marley, Creedence, Otis Redding). This makes no sense.

Which isn’t to say that compilations suck, or that there’s no art in selecting the proper songs to include in a compilation. In that spirit, we’re going to list our all-time favorite compilations. But it will be a separate list. The New Top 100 is true albums only.