Tina Turner: All The Best : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

As a double-disc set, Tina Turner's latest best-of falls between 1991's too-short Simply the Best and 1994's slapdash three-CD box The Collected Recordings: Sixties to Nineties

. This one includes 1993's inferior rendition of "Proud Mary" (from the movie What's Love Got to Do With It) and gives short shrift to Ike and Tina Turner's 1960s and 1970s catalog. Since her 1984 solo breakthrough, Private Dancer, this consummate performer and soul-rock icon has recorded one other album worthy of her gutsy delivery (1996's Wildest Dreams, which yields five selections here) and several uneven discs, most of them with dated production. All the Best collects single edits and a few full-length versions from those albums, adds a few duets and soundtrack strays, and tacks on three respectable new cuts: "Open Arms" recalls her Eighties-hit heyday, and "Complicated Disaster" and "Something Special" supply densely arranged contemporary slickness. Yet the collection fails to deliver what its title claims. Turner deserves better.