by Danois

Created on: January 06, 2007   Last Updated: May 12, 2010

Every year at Christmas time the shops are flooded with Greatest Hits albums. The Best of X, The Very Best of Y and All Time Greatest Hits of Z. You can even spot the same trend if you look at the music review pages on Helium.com; "best rock song ever", "best love songs of all time", etc. Funnily enough it seems to be the usual suspects who release their greatest hits year after year and it is also the same artists who appear on the greatest rock, greatest party and greatest Christmas compilations Cd's. Why is that? Why do we never get bored with the same old artists and their old and well-used songs?

The last band to get a song on a Christmas compilation was Wham in the mid-eighties, the rest are sixties and seventies classics like Slade and John Lennon. Maybe we can be excused for this as Christmas after all is about traditions and very little changes from year to year?

But what about the greatest rock compilation? The newest song in most top 50 greatest rock songs is "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, which is around 15 years old. All other songs are at least 25 years old. Why? What does a band have to do to tickle our taste buds and enter the exclusive club? Surely there is more than one song in the last 25 years which is worthy of a place? Where are Suede, Manic Street Preachers, Razorlight or even Travis? All have had huge hits in the last 10 years and have been the soundtrack to millions of people's lives.

Could the reason be that we are unadventurous, boring human beings living in the past? Living off old memories, unable to accept new music into our living rooms? Or are we just a bunch of romantics who get turned on by the past?

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