Let’s take off our purist hats for a moment.  I would generally agree that if you like a band or artist, you should buy whole albums, rather than only the most popular songs.  An album represents a certain period in that artist’s creative life, and therefore it should be respected as an intended whole.  As pretentious as it sounds, I like to assume there was a vision behind an album — just as there would be behind a novel or a movie.

That would suggest that buying the greatest hits collection is a cop-out, if not an insult to artists.  But sometimes, the greatest hits album turns out to be the way to go.  There are three reasons I’ve gone the greatest hits route rather than purchasing each individual album.

1) That’s all they’ve got.  Sure, sometimes artists only have a few good songs in them, and therefore it is only worthwhile to buy the album that gathers the one or two decent songs from each other album; it saves you from listening to the dreck.  But that’s not the case with the artists on the list below.  Most of them have pretty damn good secondary tracks as well.

2) Playing catch-up.  Once you’ve missed four or five records from a band, it is way more commitment than I’ve ever felt to go back and pick them all up.  Hello greatest hits!  Back in high school, I was a pure top-40 guy.  This was weird given that I was playing in a punk rock band with a Dead Kennedys guy and a Clash/Gang of Four guy.  But that was the way my high school worked.  Most of us were deeply stuck in the mainstream.  The musical outliers were easily pegged (and for the record often people I hung out with even though I never listened to their music which in retrospect seems odd).  There was the girl who liked the English Beat and the guy who liked the B-52s (before Love Shack) and the other guy who had R.E.M. (before The One I Love).  The guy with the Black Flag jacket scared me.  All those bands were outside the Wisconsin high school wheelhouse in the early to mid-80s (though I would find out many years later from my wife that those were the bands her friends were listening to in New York at the same time).

3) Lack of interest.  Some bands just don’t interest me.  Then at some point, I realize they have a dozen songs I like.  Then I buy the greatest hits album.  Then I wonder why they didn’t interest me before.

Anyway, this is the list of 14 Greatest Hits albums on my Ipod I would recommend.  Quite simply, these are all bands/artists who can fill up a greatest hits complilation with every track a worthwhile song.  If you don’t have them already, pick up these albums.

1. Beautiful South - Best of … Carry On Up the Charts

2. Bob Marley - Legend

3. Brian Ferry/Roxy Music - 20 Great Hits

4. Elvis Costello - The Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions

5. English Beat - What is Beat?

6. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Greatest Hits

7. No Doubt - The Singles 1992-2003

8. Oingo Boingo - Best of Boingo

9. Peter Gabriel - Shaking the Tree

10.  The Pixies - Wave of Mutilation: The Best of the Pixies

11. Prince - The Hits/The B-Sides (Discs 1 and 2)

12.  Squeeze - Singles

13. Talking Heads - Sand in the Vaseline

14. Tom Waits - Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years