In this life, we all make choices. You can save your money, or you can spend it. You can build walls around your heart to keep it safe, or you can open yourself up to love. You can ignore the way your brain stem lights up every time you hear the intro of “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart),” or you can liberate yourself with the truth: Being an insufferable snob is a stifling and joyless way to live, and liking Journey is actually okay.
And even if, fine, forceful blasts of pure fist-pumping uplift aren’t really your bag, you’ve at least got to acknowledge that Journey is popular. Like, really fucking popular. Journey’s 1988 Greatest Hits collection, while perhaps not the ne plus ultra of greatest-hits albums—that would be Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ Greatest Hits—has some absolute arena-rock monsters on it, including “Don’t Stop Believing,” “Any Way You Want It,” the aforementioned “Separate Ways,” and “Wheel In The Sky.”
Now, Billboard reports that Journey is now only the third band in history to have an album on the Billboard Top 200 for 500 weeks with its Greatest Hits record. (The other two are Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon and Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Legend, speaking of critical punching bags.) The album first debuted on the Billboard 200 on December 3, 1988 and stayed there until October 27, 1990, then re-surfaced on the charts in December 2009, two years after The Sopranos featured “Don’t Stop Believing” in its series finale.
That was when Billboard changed its eligibility rules for the Top 200 to allow catalog—i.e. older—albums back onto the chart, paving the way for the triumphant return of Journey’s Greatest Hits. It’s there right now, at No. 101 between The Life Of Pablo and Legend, up from No. 108 last week. And it’s probably not going anywhere anytime soon.