The Consumer’s Corner

You can make fun of the man (and his fans) all you wish because you do not have an appreciation of country music, but Garth Brooks is the biggest musical sensation that many of us will ever live to see. Garth has sold more albums than anyone ever, minus The Beatles. He’s sold out world tours for over a decade. Played to an audience in New York City (of all places) that some have estimated to have reached a simply awesome size of three quarters of a million people, with 17 million more watching at home on HBO.

Garth’s albums frequented both the pop and country charts, most often opening at number one. He was the first to debut at number one on both charts at the same time. Overall, his career is one of legend, and he’s still going. This collection of his greatest hits is currently sitting in the Billboard Top 10, despite only being available for purchase at Wal-Mart Stores. Oh yeah, that Wal-Mart deal really represents something. He was one of the first (and easily the most successful) to tell the record labels to kiss his arse, and go it alone.

‘The Ultimate Hits’ collection is just that; ultimate. Looking over the track listing (and listening a few times), I couldn’t find any omissions. Spread out over two discs, ‘The Ultimate Hits’ covers Brooks’ entire career, all the way up to ‘The Lost Sessions.’ The four new songs included are superb, though one is a bit on the ‘poppish’ side. These two discs do their very best to offer a representation of the greatest solo career ever, but that’s a enormous task for two tiny pieces of plastic.

Should you not own any Garth Brooks material (for shame!), ‘The Ultimate Hits’ would be an excellent place to start. Of course his entire library is available (exclusively at Wal-Mart) individually or in boxed sets, but this is a nice collection to cut your teeth on. You owe it to yourself as a music listener; no library can call itself worthy without at least one compilation by the top artist in American history. Strongly recommended!

Official Site

–Jeremy Hobbs

garth brooks, music, pop, country, the ultimate hits

Thank you to Stop And Hear The Music for linking to this article.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.