Compilation Album Review: "Let's Do It 2"

This is it, readers. I've posted several of these retro compilation reviews, but this is a special one – I actually owned it when it came out. Well, technically my family owned it. My sister and I asked my mum to buy it for us on cassette back in 1990. I wanted it for the tracks by Aerosmith and Technotronic, and my sister wanted it for...I can't remember. Anyway, I searched high and low looking for that cassette, to no avail. But I was lucky enough to get this CD copy in pretty much mint condition for only a dollar on eBay! Enough talk: let's do it (2).

Compilation: Let's Do It 2
Released: 1990 – WEA
Number of tracks: 16
Number one singles: 2 – "Love Shack" by The B-52s, "Janie's Got A Gun" by Aerosmith
Other top ten singles: 10
Best track: "Janie's Got A Gun" by Aerosmith
Hidden gem: There are no songs here I hadn't heard before.

The Black Box album Dreamland didn't use "Ride On Time" as its opening track, which is a bit of a shame. Thankfully, Let's Do It 2 does. Such an iconic song definitely demands – and gets – attention when it kicks off a collection of songs. It didn't get to number 1, but it bloody well should have.

The song that follows it is the only low point of this compilation: The B-52s execrable number 1 hit, the first of the decade – "Love Shack". I could tolerate it then, but now I can't stand to listen to more than five seconds of that junky piss-poor excuse for a song. If I never hear that dreck ever again it will be too soon.

Right, that's the negativity over with! It's all good from here on in. You might be fed up of songs like Kaoma's "Lambada" and Lisa Stansfield's twee and nebbishy "All Around The World" (the next two songs that follow), but I don't mind them in small doses. Milli Vanilli and Bad English follow, and although I'm not a fan of those songs, they (and most of the other 16 songs on here) hold a special place in my heart because they were the ones occupying the top 50 when I started following the charts on a weekly basis).

"Janie's Got A Gun" is one of my favourite songs of all time and I still love it now. Pump was the first album I ever got, and I've got some other Aerosmith albums since and it's still my favourite song by them. Just a brilliant, haunting song. After Motely Crue (the Motley Crue tribute act who prefer budget accommodation) and Martika, comes the seminal house track "Pump Up The Jam" by Technotronic, my fave song after Aerosmith in those early days. The inclusion of these two songs alone makes it worth the price. Hey, didn't I just say that's why I asked my mum to buy it all those years ago?

Things then go into a lull with Alannah Myles, Phil Collins, Linda Ronstadt & Aaron Neville and Michael Bolton, before it picks up towards the end with accordion-featuring "The Love We Make" by Girl Overboard, which was the only song I hadn't heard when I listened to the cassette. I think it'd finished its chart run by thew time I started watching Rage. The final track is "Just Like Jesse James" by Cher, a song I didn't mind – I definitely preferred it to her previous single "If I Could Turn Back Time" (and probably so did she, from what I've read).

This is how you put a compilation together. Just about every song here did well on the charts, and 10 of the 16 songs here made the year-end Top 30 for 1990. The average chart position of these 16 songs is between numbers 7 and 8 (it works out to be 7.5), and includes two number 1s, four number 2s, two number 3s and two number 4s. Was this a lucky coincidence? Or was early 1990 just a great time for pop music? I'd like to think the latter.

Rating: 9/10

 

2020 UPDATE: On July 5, 2020 at an antiques and collectibles market in Bendigo, Victoria (that was so good I visited it twice), I found Let's Do It 2 on vinyl. I didn't get it, because I already own it on CD, so I took the above photos for posterity. You can see that the record only has 14 tracks – the Motley Crue and Cher songs were dropped. The lineup remains solid.