by Arsenio Orteza
Post Date:
June 14, 2003 Issue Date:
June 14, 2003

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Name: WORLD
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The Top 5 best-selling pop catalog albums for the week ending May 31, according to Billboard

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1 METALLICA Metallica

607 weeks on chart

STYLE The leanest, cleanest hard-rock/heavy-metal sound of the '90s (and the seventh best-selling hard-rock/heavy-metal of all time).

WORLDVIEW Religions lie, then you die ("Holier Than Thou," "The God That Failed"); never underestimate, however, the importance of a strong national defense ("Don't Tread on Me").

OVERALL QUALITY Lean, clean, hard, and heavy-and the home of "Enter Sandman," once covered by Pat Boone himself.

2 LEGEND Bob Marley and the Wailers

711 weeks on chart

STYLE The best-selling reggae album of all time.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL None, although an unsentimental understanding of Marley's Rastafarian underpinnings is advised.

WORLDVIEW Explicitly: that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are worth getting up, standing up, and fighting for; implicitly: that smoking marijuana is a sacrament and that slain Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie is the Messiah.

OVERALL QUALITY Buoyant, catchy, determined, joyful.

3 GREATEST HITS Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band

445 weeks on chart

STYLE Blue-collar rock 'n' roll of no discernible subtlety.

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL "Night Moves" (single-entendres).

WORLDVIEW "My hands were steady / My eyes were clear and bright / My walk had purpose / My steps were quick and light / And I held firmly / To what I felt was right / Like a rock."

OVERALL QUALITY Tough-guy exterior, soft gooey insides-greeting-card verse in rock 'n' roll clothing.

4 PARACHUTES Coldplay

100 weeks on chart

STYLE U2 at its gloomiest meets Radiohead at its doomiest.

WORLDVIEW "If you ever feel neglected, / If you think all is lost, / I'll be counting up my demons, yeah, / Hoping everything's not lost."

OVERALL QUALITY Confessions of a navel-gazer, slowed down to create the impression of having been recollected in tranquility.

5 ONE NIGHT ONLY Bee Gees

79 weeks on chart

STYLE A late-'90s performance of late-'60s/early-'70s folk-schlock hits and mid-to-late-'70s disco hits (the Bee Gees' own and some they wrote for other people).

OBJECTIONABLE MATERIAL "Closer Than Close" (double-entendres).

WORLDVIEW "Lonely days, lonely nights, where would I be without my woman?"

OVERALL QUALITY Not bad, but no substitute for the studio versions or 1977's Here at Last ... Live!

Arsenio Orteza

Arsenio is a music reviewer for WORLD Magazine and one of its original contributors from 1986.

@ArsenioOrteza

Bestsellers

The Top 5 best-selling pop catalog albums for the week ending May 31, according to Billboard

Full access isn’t far.

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