Redartz: Just about all of us, no doubt, have a fair collection of music (perhaps less extensive than our comic collection, but still impressive). You may have shelves of vinyl lp's, or racks of cd's. Or you may be 'up to date' and have thousands of tunes on your computer or phone. Regardless, many of those tunes are organized as albums, and probably most feature a single performer or group. Beatles albums, Kiss albums, Police discs, whatever. You get the idea.
Well, I have many such as well; but I have an addiction to something different: compilations. It started back in the vinyl age, when K-Tel and Ronco albums offered twenty top hits on one cheap lp. With my limited budget, these discs were often purchased in place of a given artist's offering. And the wide range of music they offered added an element of fun; often several of the included songs were new to me.A few years later, when the compact disc arrived, the compilation compulsion hit me double time. Now there was unprecedented variety of themed compilation discs: Beach music, British Invasion Hits, Dr. Demento's hits, and much much more. Among the most fun were "Television's Greatest Hits", a series of cd's which collected tv themes from the fifties to the present. Loads of fun.
But one particular category of compilation discs stands out for me, and represents a large percentage of such discs in my collection: year-themed discs. These include the Time/Life sets (sets for the sixties, the seventies, organized year-by-year). Similarly, the "Billboard's Greatest Rock and Roll Hits" series (the only downside to that series is that they only feature ten cuts per disc)). Then there are the "Rock On" cd's; similar to the Billboard series but they contain a dozen songs each, and tend to have less commonly-found picks). These 'yearly' discs appeal to the obsessive-compulsive in me: I love organizing it all chronologically (I will sometimes binge listen to a decade's assemblage, in proper order of course).
And there are many other compilations to be found, too many to name. One cool set I picked up last year at a yard sale was a five-disc set called "Living in Oblivion: the 80's Greatest Hits". This massive set had about twenty songs per disc, and were heavily oriented towards UK new wave music. Loads of songs I'd only heard a few times, or not at all. These cd's only set me back a dollar apiece, so that got me a load of music quite affordably. That's one of the big appeals to compilation discs: usually a lot of bang for your buck. That, plus the likelihood of finding an intriguing compilation of tunes appealing to whatever esoteric nature you possess. That may explain why some friends call me the 'king of compilation discs'. Ok, not the greatest title, but one takes what one can get. In conclusion, here are a few choice collections from my collection...
