February 04, 2006
"Best Of" Albums
Ann Althouse makes the great point:
But when did "best of" collections become respectable? I remember when it was considered embarrassing to purchase your music in that form. If you haven't been following an artist, you were supposed to pick an album. You were supposed to try to figure out which is the best one, and start there, with a set of tracks in the form the artist wanted.
I remember that "Best Of" albums used to be what girls listened to; guys would get every single Zep album and figure out for themselves which songs were good and which ones weren't--and sharing these preferences was a great discovery technique. But girls would just go and get the Queen's Greatest Hits album and tell everyone how great Bohemian Rhapsody and Another One Bites the Dust are. Real Men never had a Best Of album. (This is consistent with the general male obsession with trivia, a great point that Mencken makes in In Defense of Women.)
So, the fact that "Best Of" albums have become respectable is, to me, representative of the increased feminization of our culture.
Posted by Morgan at 01:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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