Greatest Hits

I’ve always been more of a movie guy than a music guy. It’s not that I didn’t listen to music, but I connected more with films—that’s right, I called them films—than I did with songs.

My passion translated into a massive DVD collection. If I loved a movie in the theater, I couldn’t wait to buy it on DVD when it came out months later.

I didn’t own nearly as many CDs because I felt like I got burned every time I bought one. There would be one or two great songs, and the rest were just…meh. Tired of spending $15 to hear the same two songs on repeat, I started investing in greatest-hits albums. That meant buying music from established artists who had already built up a repertoire of great songs. It also kept me from being on the cutting edge or discovering new talent. But with this strategy, I knew I could throw a CD into the player without having to hit “skip” every three minutes.

I was left out of conversations about the greatest fill-in-the-blank albums of all time, which made me start wondering if I was uncultured. A simpleton. That wondering eventually turned into more than 30 years of believing I was musically unrefined.

Then, the other day, I was driving two of the boys to soccer practice and decided I wanted to listen to Guns N’ Roses. I searched Amazon Music and was ready to play Appetite for Destruction when I spotted a greatest-hits album.

Of course, I played the greatest-hits album. My boys weren’t going to judge me, and they wanted to hear the classics.

While rocking out in the driver’s seat of the minivan, I had an epiphany: Greatest-hits albums make perfect sense when you think about them in terms of sports and movies.

If I pull up a Michael Jordan highlight reel, I don’t want to watch him miss layups and turn the ball over. Wayne Gretzky famously said, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” Well, I’m not going to watch a video showing all those missed shots. Yes, I understand the point of the quote, and no, this example doesn’t really fit.

And consider Rocky IV, one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time and home to the two best montages in movie history. Can you imagine if those montages showed Rocky getting worse? Getting knocked out? Giving up and going home?

Of course not. A montage gives us the best parts. It cuts out the dead weight and gets us to the moments we came for.

A greatest-hits album is just a musical montage.

That’s when I realized I’m not unsophisticated. Everyone who judged me for buying greatest-hits albums was either lying to themselves or being a pretentious asshole.

So, go ahead and enjoy your B-side gems. I’ll be in the minivan, windows down, listening to the hits.