Ice Cube‘s ferocious frown is familiar now from multiple big and small screen appearances, but as this collection reminds us, he’s still first and foremost the thinking street thug’s rapper, one of the original gangstas.

GREATEST HITS isn’t sequenced chronologically, jumping frantically from 1998’s “Pushing Weight” to 1994’s “Check Yo Self” with its “Message” backing track, to 1990’s furious Public Enemy-influenced “Jackin’ For Beats” (Ice Cube’s departure from P.E.’s rivals N.W.A. presaged his hooking up with the Bomb Squad, Public Enemy’s production team).

But though the patchwork song list makes a clear overview of Cube‘s career difficult, it also makes for some thrilling twists and turns, for instance between the rowdy, early-’90s “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate