Santana – Black Magic Woman (Best of Santana) (1986)

This is one of the first albums my family owned. Back in the 80's my father bought a portable CD player that we could connect to our stereo and even the car stereo. Back then, CDs were called laser discs. This is a German compilation album of Santana's greatest hits. The album cover is incredibly 80's. I had to spend some time actually finding the track list for this album, because the actual CD is in Finland. Fortunately, I was able to compile a playlist on Spotify for all of these songs. I grew up with Santana, because my father listened to it quite a lot, but when I grew up and started making more of my own choices in music, I have never really been much of a fan of Santana. It is basically a prime example of dad-rock and definitely very uncool. Even so, I think Santana is legendary enough that owning one album by them is justified. Although, I wish this was Abraxas on vinyl instead.



If I'm not completely wrong, we might have bought this album from Hamburg in the late 80's when we were there on a family holiday. On the same trip we bought Nintendo game Dr. Mario that my father really got hooked on and he used to play it all the time in my room. I'm quite sure we were listening to this album while playing as well. So, this album, Dr. Mario and a trip to Hamburg are associated in a strange way in my head. How I ended up with this CD I can't really remember. I probably just listened to it quite a lot as a kid and it got stuck to my own CD collection as it grew larger.

Santana is obviously a legendary guitar hero, but that's really where my appreciation for him stays. I think most of the songs are either super cheesy, or they just have sounds I'm not too fond of. I can pretty much understand the historical significance of Santana, because he was making music that was different from any other type of music and he probably brought a lot of attention to latin music back in the day. However, this is so far from the stuff I usually listen to that it's difficult to evaluate it objectively.

There are a few songs I particularly remember from my childhood. Black Magic Woman, Europa (Earth's Cry Heaven's Smile), Samba Pa Ti and Jingo were the "greatest hits" in our home. My dad really liked the cheesy guitars in two middle ones and I myself liked the kinds of African rhythm influences on Jingo. Now, listening through this album, I notice how many typical 80's songs were on this album. I didn't realise it back then. I couldn't make a difference between different decades of Santana back then, but now it's only too obvious which songs are from the 70's and which from the 80's.

Personally, I think some of the 70's songs actually are not even that bad, but it's still probably not something I would really listen to. Then again, some of the 80's songs on this album are just awful. Still, as I said, it's good to own at least a compilation like this because Santana is legendary enough that every record collection should probably have at least one album by him.

Listen to the album on Spotify.