In November 2000, the world was a boring place. The YK2 disaster never came to pass, the dot-com bubble peaked, Concorde crashed, and the presidential election generated no excitement until nobody could figure out who won. The Cold War was ten years in the past and 9/11 was a year away, so all was quiet on the western front.
Amidst this historical snoozefest, a classic defunct band repackaged their greatest hits again and put them on a single CD. Releases of this type are common ways of milking an undead musical cow. The names are familiar: The Very Best of, Greatest Hits, and The Essentials. Normally the public doesn’t care, seeing these albums as shameless money grabs. But on November 13th, 2000, the public forgot their cynicism and went to the stores en masse to buy a collection of songs they’d already paid for.
Of course, only one band commands that level of respect: The Beatles.
Background
At the end of 2000, Beatlesville was just as sleepy as the rest of Western Civilization. Five years earlier, in 1995, the surviving Beatles gathered for Anthology, an official oral history to tell their story in their own words while also creating ‘new’ Beatles songs from unfinished John Lennon demo tapes. The timing proved immaculate for heartbreaking reasons. Shortly after Anthology aired, George Harrison was diagnosed with cancer; he would succumb to the disease in November 2001.
With Anthology behind them, few expected a major Beatles anything for several years. Smaller projects walked out the door, like the remastered Yellow Submarine movie with a special remix album in 1999.
So when the new compilation album 1 was released, it seemed like another tidying up project.
The public disagreed.
The Album’s Construction
1 has a simple premise: it is a collection of songs which hit Number 1 on the charts. For any other band, this would be a short album of specialties. For The Beatles, this was a smug flex: they presented no fewer than 27 songs without needing to pad their brief. The album runs 79 minutes 38 seconds, just under the 80 minute information limit of CDs. In another show of confidence, The Beatles didn’t pull songs from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, their best-selling studio album, to fill out the roster. Other classic albums like Rubber Soul and The White Album are also unrepresented.
Though the compilation’s concept was simple, the inclusion criteria was not. Ostensibly, songs needed to hit Number One on either the UK or US charts during the band’s lifetime to make the playlist. By this standard, early classic Please Please Me should be on the album, but it is not as it did not chart on the UK’s Record Retailer chart. Strawberry Fields Forever, arguably the best Beatles song ever, is also AWOL because it only hit number two in the UK while its partner song Penny Lane is presented and accounted for because it hit the top of the American chart in 1967.
Once the songs were picked, they were assembled in chronological order, remastered and released.
It Sold How Much Exactly?
Beatle-savvy consumers waltzing into record shops on November 13th 2000 would have found the songs on the new compilation thoroughly redundant. All 27 songs were on the previous compilations 1962-1966 and 1967-1970, nicknamed The Red Album and The Blue Album after their respective border font colors. It should be noted those albums are also some of the top sellers in the band’s catalogue. Not only were these 27 number ones on those existing best-sellers, the previous compilations came with an additional twenty-seven songs for listeners to enjoy.
In other words, 1 cut The Red and Blue albums’ tracklist exactly in half.
The public didn’t care.
In five weeks, 1 became 2000’s best selling album, the fourth best-selling album of the decade in Britain and promptly went on to become the 21st best-selling album in British history. It debuted at number one in the US and sold 1.2 million copies before Americans learned the identity of their 43rd president. The rest of the world reacted similarly. Today, it is on the best-selling albums list for the following countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, United Kingdom, and United States.
Sorry Eminem, the Real Slim Shady just stood up.
Are You Kidding Me?
Okay, we have a banal mystery on our hands. Why in the name of God did this album—which may I remind you contained no new songs and offered listeners no compelling reason to buy it—outsell everything The Beatles already outsold?
I suspect the answer is in two parts. First, The Red and Blue albums this new record supplanted were two double albums. As Ringo Starr himself said in Anthology, “there’s a lot of information on a double album.” Popular as those albums are, overwhelming consumers with choices isn’t a recipe for success and there’s no doubt 1 is a more streamlined record.
Second, 1’s listening experience is more than a match for the classic albums the band created all those years ago. In my Sgt. Pepper post, I was of the opinion that that album is far superior to other Beatles albums because listening to it from start-to-finish is part of the album’s appeal. Like Pepper and Abbey Road, 1’s listening experience is a complete story: the story of the Beatles.
From their first rudimentary hit Love Me Do to The Long and Winding Road—a song whose creation was so acrimonious that it was used as evidence for unfair business dealings in Paul McCartney’s 1970 legal motion to dissolve The Beatles—1 takes the listener on the whirlwind romance that was Beatlemania. Placed in perfect sequential order, the listener is reminded that the Beatles fired off hit single after hit single (I Want to Hold Your Hand, Can’t Buy Me Love, etc) despite being worn down emotionally and physically (A Hard Day’s Night, Eight Days A Week, Help). And still, the Beatles effectively created modern music culture by implementing classical music in their songs (Yesterday, All You Need Is Love), finding subject matter besides romance (Paperback Writer, Eleanor Rigby, Yellow Submarine), and then, after eight years of mega stardom, simply walked away (Let It Be).
Conclusion
Never in the history of popular music has such an unassuming album achieved such staggering commercial success. Logically, 1 offered nothing listeners didn’t already have. Emotionally, it was the most streamlined, comprehensive listening experience of that most famous of bands.
A Number One indeed.