My current research looks at the proliferation of Greatest Hits albums at the beginning of the 1990s, as a barometer of the cultural changes that marked the end of the 1980s. Tracing the UK album charts between 1986 and1996, it looks at the rise of the Greatest Hits package as a tour de force: peaking in 1992 with 29 compilations making the Top 10; and 47% of the end of year Top 30 comprised of re-releases and anthologies. More so than the discreet genres that defined the era (Rave, Acid House, Grunge, Brit Pop etc), I will explore the idea that the success of the Greatest Hits album is reflective of a much wider milieu and, as such, can be read against a number of key narratives. Firstly, the significance of the Greatest Hits album can be attributed to the success of the Compact Disc, particularly in positioning an older, more affluent, audience demographic as pivotal consumers. In this sense, it completed the process of canonisation and the framing of pop music heritage around a body of ‘classic’ artists, albums and songs. Secondly, for younger consumers, the Greatest Hits album represented excellent value for money. At a time when CDs were approximately a third more expensive than vinyl and cassette editions of the same releases, Greatest Hits offered a sure return on a relatively high investment.
The success of the Greatest Hits album is, therefore, also about generational shift: the nostalgia of Baby Boomers in middle age, and the diminished cultural prerogative of Generation X in defining pop. It is here, after all, we encounter the first Generation Y teenagers, who will go on to become proto-Millienials at the end of the decade. These are the children who bought records by novelty pop act Jive Bunny and recycled soap stars from Stock Aitken Waterman. This is, perhaps, the first generation for whom engaging in pop music culture with your parents was not only technologically possible, but ideologically compatible: the children of Boomers for whom rock ’n’ roll had been routinised since infancy and for whom the Greatest Hits album had a singular, comforting allure. This is the generation that would go on to embrace X-Factor, the jukebox musical and give Take That a 21st Century renaissance: in short, rejecting pop music as clandestine and subversive, and celebrating instead wholesome family fun.
It is now nearly thirty years since the end of 1980s. Now That’s What I Call Music 16 provided the expurgated chart highlights; Tears for Fears, Belinda Carlisle, Erasure, Debbie Harry opened side one. However, it’s easy to forget that the autumn of 1989 also saw three consecutive number ones from Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers (‘Swing the Mood’; ‘That’s What I Like’; and ‘Let’s Party’). A rehash of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid II and a house reworking of a 1970s Loretta Holloway disco track (Black Box's ‘Ride on Time’) also topped the singles chart. Only Lisa Stansfield ('All Around The World') and New Kids on the Block (You Got It - The Right Stuff) provided fresh meat. Compare that with the opening of the decade: number ones from Pink Floyd (‘Another Brick in the Wall)’; Pretenders (Brass in Pocket); The Specials (Too Much Too Young); Blondie (‘Atomic’ and ‘Call Me’); and The Jam (Going Underground). Only Kenny Rogers (‘Coward of the County’) and Fern Kinney (‘Together We Are Beautiful’) diminish the cool. It is just as well that pop music history is revisionist...
Clearly the Eighties is more than just a chronological marker when it comes to pop music culture, symbolising instead a coalescence of attitudes and values around a shifting sonic template that spliced Disco and Rock culture, evolving into Hip-Hop and House. When it began can be stretched back before MTV, to the end of the Seventies, the post-Punk mainstream, the emergence of pop music video and the launch of Smash Hits in 1978. When it concluded, however, is open to interpretation. Certainly, the sound and politics of pop seemed to shifted after Live Aid (1985) to a more serious and issue orientated agenda. And as the success of Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers suggests, the end of the decade had already become quite sentimental, even if that nostalgia, was a synthetic experience to be shared only by Grandparents and pre-teens. By the time you actually get into the Nineties there is confusing devolution of the mainstream intro discreet tribes: MOR, Dance Music, Hip Hop, Grunge, Alternative Rock and Indie. The end of the Eighties is, therefore, not about a specific date but about the end of a version of the mainstream: a changing of the guard, as the stars that had defined a preceding era struggled to find a foothold amidst the fractured, fin de siècle anxiety of the 1990s.
Within the mainstream, this change in sensibility is perhaps best epitomised in the MTV Unplugged franchise, which turned the plastic sensibility of Eighties music video on its head: a live concert series that eschewed synthesisers and electric guitars in favour of paired down performances using acoustic instruments. Tellingly, it was a generation of older white men that paved the way in this new medium: Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Elsewhere, Pop Situationists like David Bowie and Debbie Harry floundered in the new world order: abandoning the mainstream; confusing fans with lo-fi ‘plugged’ tours and refusing to play their old hits. By 1993, performers on Top of the Pops were not even allowed to mime. How did that happen? Grunge and Nirvana’s Nevermind is often cited as a moment of shift. Producer Butch Vig’s sonic template for the album certainly had an impact beyond the restricted Grunge/Alternative Rock community, stripping away the excess layers of Eighties production, epitomised in bands like Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Guns and Roses etc, in favour of a more minimalist style. In the aftermath, everyone from The Cult to Belinda Carlisle were pursuing a less synthetic, authentic raw sound.
Nirvana’s Nevermind went on to sell over 30 millions copies worldwide; however, when it was released, at the end of 1991, it was a slow-burn in terms of UK chart success. Eventually the record peaked at number 7 in January 1992 and spent six weeks in the top ten. By contrast, Lionel Ritchie’s best of album Back to Front spent six week at number one, and twenty four weeks in the top ten, with the single ‘My Destiny’ speaking at number 7. Other big sellers of that era include Eurythmics’ Greatest Hits, Queen’s Greatest Hits II, Tina Turner’s Simply The Best, Madonna The Immaculate Collection, Paul Young’s From Time To Time, Cher’s Greatest Hits 1965 to 1992, and Erasure’s (optimistically titled) Pop - The First Twenty Hits. Tracing the arc of sales across the turn of the decade it is clear that this proliferation of compilation albums settled down again as the Nineties proceeds, with the period between 1991 and 1993 as something of a high-water mark. By 1995 Brit Pop established a new equilibrium, distinct from the politics of the 1980s, but reacquainting the mainstream with both its 60s Art School legacy and 70s Punk history: an inward looking, anachronistic heritage piece that denies both the legacy of MTV and Smash Hits. By contrast the critical mass of Greatest Hits albums released at the start of the decade set in place a self-sustaining narrative that framed the 1980s as the apex of British pop music culture, and a history that has endured well into the 21st Century.
As a sort of coda, it is worth noting the failure of certain Best Of packages in proclaiming their own sequel in the title, only for chart success of that artist to evaporate post-anthology. To this end, it will be considered whether the Greatest Hits constitutes a full stop in the denouement of an artists’ Imperial Phase: Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, Belinda Carlise, Simple Minds, Jimmy Sommerville, Madness, Gloria Estefan all released successful Greatest Hits compilations in this period, but never replicated the success of their pre-anthologised careers. For many, it was the death nail; for the few a solo springboard (Sting, Paul Weller, George Michael, Annie Lennox etc). Ironically, however, it was perhaps the habilitation of Abba, at the end of 1992, after a decade in the pop wilderness, that truly marks The End of the end of the Eighties. Though the band achieved two number one singles in 1980 with ‘The Winner Takes it All’ and ‘Super Trouper’, they belonged to a previous era, before Punk, Smash Hits and all that filtered into the MTV generation of New Pop. Arguably their re-emergence said more about the direction of pop music culture in the 1990s and beyond than Nirvana, Rave or Brit Pop.
The revival of Abba in the 1990s inaugurated a brave new world in which pop history could be re-imagined exponentially: from kitsch novelty act, to a vehicle for musical theatre and an international film franchise. Ushered in from the cold by Erasure’s Abbaesque EP (which topped the UK singles chart for five weeks in June 1992), the Swedish quartet had been the epitome of uncool for the duration of the preceding decade: their last top hit having been One of Us in 1981, followed by a series of flops. However, the fêting of the band in the early Nineties reframed their camp legacy within a new narrative of post-modern irony: epitomised in the parodic tribute act Bjorn Again and U2’s Zoo TV cover of 'Dancing Queen'. The ensuing success of Abba Gold: Greatest Hits, however, eclipsed this and, indeed, the success of any best-of from any Eighties artists’ compilations that preceded it. Not only did it become the 12th best selling album of 1992 (and 9th best selling album of the decade), but, in 1999 ,it re-entered the charts in the wake of the West End musical Mama Mia, to become the 4th best selling of that year. Since then, it has gone on to achieve the longest running top 100 album of all time, with over 900 weeks on the chart, multiple top-10 re-entries and a second tenure at the top in 2008.
The success of Abba Gold: Greatest Hits is, of course, a product not just of the enduring appeal of Abba’s music but the way in which Björn Ulvaeus & Benny Andersson pioneered the canonisation of their own legacy in the Mamma Mia stage and film franchise. The success of the 2018 film sequel Mamma Mia - Here We Go Again, rehabilitated a number of lesser known songs from their repertoire and marked the beginning of a procession of jukebox musicals cohered around the music of 20th Century pop culture icons, including: Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen); Rocket Man (Elton John); Yesterday (The Beatles) and Blinded by the Light (Bruce Springsteen). That these films might represent the conclusion of the era of the rock star is certain: their legacies archived as light entertainment for future generations to access the songbook. However, as the singles chart of 1989 intimates, this process began thirty years earlier. As the sun set on the 1980s, a more retrospective culture emerged, a culture that would frame the way people thought about pop music as product: no longer at the cutting edge of art and commerce, or the vanguard of identity politics and culture, but rather as a Culture Industry. The Greatest Hits album crystallised this vision of branded legacies to be valued expediently and commoditised: a process which continues to this day ad infinitum. The Jive Bunny triptych of number one singles in the Autumn of 1989 is, in this sense, the perfect prologue: a befitting outro to a decade that ultimately ate itself.
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