The only film soundtrack in the 10 best-selling albums of all time list
Are art and the charts separate entities? Is there a chasm between commercialism and creativity? Can the two meet, or is it a bridge too far? For every Frank Zappa who asserted: “Art is moving closer to commercialism and never the twain shall meet,” there is an Andy Warhol who opines: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Zappa’s sizable nose would certainly have been put out of joint by the fact that a soundtrack no less, resides among the top ten best-selling albums of all time.
It is worth noting, however, that the records on the all-time global best-sellers list are inherent oddities. They are artefacts that have surpassed usual levels of popularity and entered a weird phase of becoming a cultural phenomenon. More so than reflecting tastes, they seem to me to reflect a mental anomaly that commercial strategists, psychologists and anthropologists alike should study in-depth.
They represent the moment art and fads intersect, and nothing says that quite like Whitney Houston’s soundtrack for the 1992 film, The Bodyguard. It is perhaps the most peculiar entry on the list given that you simply wouldn’t expect a film soundtrack to rank so highly, but it would seem in 1992, everyone went cock-a-hoop for the accompaniment to Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston’s heroic killer evading antics. Much like the film, it’s more explosively cheesy than the initial whiff from a bag of Cheetos and carries all the subtlety of a policeman’s knock.
However, Houston hits notes that threaten to blast satellites out of orbit and she does it with the sort of control that conspiracy theorists could only fantasise about. Musically it didn’t pull up any trees, but Houston’s vocal volley certainly coaxed curious birds from their branches to witness Whitney hitting notes with avian ease. What’s more, they even chucked the original rafter rattler himself, Joe Cocker, in the mix for good measure.
The album has sold over 45 million copies worldwide. That is an eye-watering figure. However, it is notable that unlike others on the list, the bulk of those sales came in one huge instant surge and the album has quite carried as much clout thereafter. Nevertheless, the fact that it had a screen accompaniment meant that it dominated the cultural landscape for a good while. And with a hit like ‘I Will Always Love You’ – which has well over one billion plays on YouTube – in its ranks, it was always going to chart highly.
You can check out the ten biggest-selling albums of all time below. However, owing to the fact that chart data is surprisingly unscrupulous when sales get so bombastic, we have simply put them in alphabetical order to avoid perpetuating misinformation. (NB Saturday Night Fever was recorded before the film without the script in mind and only later enlisted by producers who wanted to replace the planned Boz Scaggs tracks at the last minute).
The ten best-selling albums of all time:
- Back in Black – AC/DC
- Bat Out of Hell – Meatloaf
- Come on Over – Shania Twain
- Hotel California – Eagles
- Rumours – Fleetwood Mac
- Saturday Night Fever – Bee Gees
- The Bodyguard: Original Soundtrack Album – Whitney Houston
- The Dark Side of the Moon – Pink Floyd
- Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) – Eagles
- Thriller – Michael Jackson
