Culture Club: Greatest Hits

Album Review

There have been plenty of Culture Club collections over the years, but 2005's Greatest Hits is the first since 1993's At Worst...The Best of Boy George and Culture Club to be assembled with any thought or care. The rest have been cheap budget-line collections, but they did all serve up the big hits — "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," "Time (Clock of the Heart)," "I'll Tumble 4 Ya," "Church of the Poison Mind," "Karma Chameleon," "Miss Me Blind," "It's a Miracle" — even if sometimes that's all they served up. Greatest Hits digs deeper (even if it doesn't include the Boy George solo hits on At Worst; it also doesn't have the Malcolm McLaren intro that mars the beginning of "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me" on that disc), but the question for most listeners will be: do I need to dig deeper than the biggest hits? Most listeners will be happy with that aforementioned seven and find any disc that runs ten songs longer, as this does, to be kind of tiresome, even if it includes the gloriously silly "The War Song," which is the goofiest protest single ever. That said, those who do want a good 17-song cross-section of the band's entire career will be very happy with this, since it has all the singles in good sound — even if it's unlikely that most listeners will listen to this much past track eight or ten (the latter is "Black Money," one of the rare first-rate Culture Club album tracks).