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Pay attention, because this gets tricky. Very tricky. The first Queen Greatest Hits released in America was a 14-track LP that hit the stores in 1981. Several years later, CDs overtook LPs as the leading format of recorded music, but due to various legal reasons, Queen's catalog didn't hit CD until 1991, and soon, CD compilations started to appear in bewildering configurations. In the U.K., where Queen remained on the charts throughout the '80s, a sequel to that 1981 Greatest Hits was released in 1991, chronicling such hits as "Under Pressure," "I Want to Break Free," and "Radio Ga Ga." In the U.S., Queen stopped having Top 40 hits after "Radio Ga Ga," so Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 was filled with music largely unfamiliar to the American listener. Hollywood, the American label with the rights to the reissues, thus decided to slightly reconfigure that U.K. Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 by dropping a few tracks and substituting such radio staples as "Tie Your Mother Down" and "Stone Cold Crazy," along with the hits "Under Pressure" and "Bohemian Rhapsody," which was a current hit in 1992 thanks to its exposure in the hit film Wayne's World. This reconfigured Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 was called Classic Queen and it was a Top Ten hit, but surely listeners expecting Queen songs a little more classic than "Headlong" and "I'm Going Slightly Mad" were disappointed that, say, "We Will Rock You" and "Another One Bites the Dust" weren't on this new CD. So, six months after the March 1992 release of Classic Queen, Hollywood followed with Greatest Hits, which may have shared its name with the 1981 collection but essentially rounded up the tunes from that disc that didn't appear on Classic Queen, adding a few more tunes to bring it up to 17 tracks.

That's confusing enough, but it doesn't stop there. Since the 1981 collection had an expert track selection, it continued to be a big seller in the U.S. as an import CD, and then in 1994, Parolophone in the U.K. reworked the compilation to bring it up to 17 tracks -- which appears to be the magic number for Queen compilations since that's what Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, Classic Queen, the 1992 Greatest Hits, and the subsequent 1999 Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 all run. This reconfigured Greatest Hits was the best available hits compilation, but it was only available as an import in the States, or as part of the 1995 two-disc repackage of Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 & 2, or as part of the 2001 repackaging The Platinum Collection, which contained the British versions of the three Greatest Hits discs. These latter two were American releases that snuck out the preferred British version, because the British versions of the Greatest Hits always had the more logical track sequences; Classic Queen and the 1992 Greatest Hits were rush jobs. Despite that, those 1992 American compilations remained on the market, and Classic Queen remained the easiest way for a fan to get most, but not all, of Queen's hits as a single-disc collection.

Until this 2004 release, that is. Entitled Greatest Hits: We Will Rock You Edition, this is the long-awaited stand-alone reissue of the first Queen Greatest Hits, with the addition of three bonus tracks, plus an offer to save 20 percent on any package to see the Queen theatrical musical We Will Rock You at Paris Las Vegas. So, it's a tie-in -- and not just for the musical, because "I'm in Love With My Car" was used in commercial for Jaguar in 2004, so it's added as a bonus track (the other two bonus tracks are live versions of "Under Pressure" and "Tie Your Mother Down") -- but who cares? This compilation is finally available on its own on CD in the U.S. and that's worth celebrating, even if at this point most fans who care will own the import or one of those repackages (or, frankly, could assemble the collection from the discs they already own). But for those listeners still looking for the perfect single-disc Queen collection, this is as close as you're going to get, and it's nice to have it available on the U.S. shores as a stand-alone domestic release. Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide

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