I vividly remember the day I picked this up. It was late in the fall of 2001, and I was at Potomac Mills or one of those gigantoid malls with my folks. They were shopping for some manner of housewares, and I was shopping for music. I'd just started teaching and finished paid off my credit card debt. I was writing punk rock reviews for a now defunct web site. So I had disposable income and desire; the twin engines of capitalism.
This was back when a good-sized mall had two or three places to buy CD's. I wandered about with great abandon, but didn't find the kind of music I was looking for. CD versions of albums by first-generation punk bands were still kinda hard to come by at stores. But I had read John Lydon's autobiography Rotten, in which Chrissie Hynde figures prominently. So this was deemed an acceptable substitute for L.A.M.F. or Blank Generation.
I remember listening to it quite a bit that winter of 2001, and liking it. But my love vanished pretty quickly. I never bothered analyzing why; I just started listening to other things instead. I've never really thought about why until recently.
Fast-forward about seven years. I'm married, and we have a Playstation, and the wife can't get enough of rocking out "Tattooed Love Boys" on Guitar Hero 2. We're driving up and back from some out-of-town trip, talking about music, and I get an idea, born of excessive viewings of High Fidelity:
"Hey, why don't we raid Record and Tape Traders on the way home? I'll get you the first Pretenders album."
And it all goes according to plan. We go there, we check out music, we make snarky comments and I make gaga sounds over stuff I'd like to buy. I forget what I got for myself (probably a Rev. Horton Heat or Supersuckers disc), but Wifie cam out with all the "Tattooed Love Boys" and "Precious" she could handle. Later on, I got her Pretenders II before she got tired of them as well. They're both sitting on our respective iPods, called up upon occasion.
In all that time, I never popped this CD in. Not once. Because I have attitude about listening to Greatest Hits packages when the real album exists? No, because not all of these songs are on the first two albums. Is it because I don't like these songs? No, because "Middle of the Road" is playing now, and I can't think of a single thing I don't like about it. Then why has this dropped from my rotation?
I think there are two reasons. First, the Pretenders are best taken in small doses. There's a strange kind of coldness to their music, a deep blue melancholy that even the most blistering rock songs dont' quite shake. I get the same feeling with REM, and it really limits regular sustained listening.
Also, I don't think Singles Collections are terribly good ideas. A Greatest Hits set purports to be those songs people already really like; a Singles Collection promises only those songs that were released as singles. Sure, a good few of those songs will overlap, but not always. I doubt very much that anyone out there really prefers "Stop Your Sobbing" or "Talk of the Town" to "Precious" and "Bad Boys Get Spanked."
Most likely, I'll load these songs onto iTunes and listen to them when the mood strikes. Individually, the songs are fine and make good playlist fodder. As a group, they don't cohere nearly as well as they should.
Grade: OK
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