You might have thought that, since the 1998 merger of MCA and PolyGram, creating Universal Music, brought the hits
Cher scored in the 1970s and '80s for Kapp, MCA, Casablanca, and Geffen under one roof, the next time they got around to doing a best-of they would combine all those catalogs. No such luck. In the wake of
Cher's 1999 comeback with "Believe," Geffen issued its own comp,
If I Could Turn Back Time: Cher's Greatest Hits. So, when MCA came to compile
The Best of Cher as part of the midline-priced 20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection series, they simply took the 1974 MCA Greatest Hits album, stripped off two B-sides, and added the 1979 Casablanca disco hit "Take Me Home" and the 1971
Sonny & Cher hit "All I Ever Need Is You." The result is an improvement on the still-in-print and also discount-priced Greatest Hits that really should be called "The Best of Cher in the '70s." But, with the '80s hits on the Geffen set and
Cher's '60s hits belonging to Warner EMI, anyone looking for a comprehensive single-disc compilation on the artist remains frustrated. ~ William Ruhlmann