HAIL TO THE QUEEN
WE’LL NEVER LIVE in a world without Tina Turner. She didn’t just pull off the greatest comeback in music history — she invented the whole concept of the comeback as we know it today. She became a solo superstar when she was 44. Things like that simply don’t happen. That’s how old Brandy, Usher, Adam Levine, and John Legend are right now. Tina Turner was just beginning. But nothing she faced could ever scare that grit out of her voice.
She carried the whole story of American music in her voice, because in many ways, she was that story, and also a lot more. She was Anna Mae Bullock from Nutbush, Tennessee, daughter of sharecroppers, fighting her way in and out of the Chitlin’ Circuit. She was just a kid when she got famous, as half of Ike and Tina Turner. Her deep-country voice and his guitar always made a fearsome combo in early hits like “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and “I Idolize You.” “The emotions I expressed were real because I lived those feelings,” she wrote in a 2019 essay in RollIng Stone. “Even ‘Private Dancer’ — which seems to be about prostitution, but is also about wishes, hopes, and dreams — tells the story of women like me, caught up in sad situations, who somehow find a way to go on.”
Her defining hit was “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” which shocked radio audiences in 1984 between Madonna, Prince, and Cyndi Lauper. Unlike anyone else near her age, she had zero interest in passing for young. This woman had lived. She’d stared down more hard times than your miserable Smiths-loving teenage mind could imagine. She truly became Tina Turner in 1984, with Private Dancer. It was a new kind of rock blockbuster, shimmying over generational, racial, cultural, and musical boundaries. Lots of stars had claimed to be the Queen of Rock & Roll, but after Private Dancer, nobody came near that crown.
Tina’s life story turns on her escape from and triumph over her abusive marriage. Strange as it might seem today, she was one of the first stars to talk aloud about domestic violence. It’s easy to take for granted, partly because of the way she changed public awareness about spousal abuse. Hero worship for Tina Turner is practically an industry, yet we’re still underrating what she did. But part of her greatness is refusing to be the professional survivor the media wanted her to be. She didn’t need another hero.
When her life story became the Angela Bassett movie What’s Love Got to Do With It, she couldn’t bring herself to watch it. As she wrote in RollIng Stone, “I never saw What’s Love Got to Do With It
because I was too close to those painful memories.” She resisted the idea of the Broadway musical Tina
for the same reason, saying, “I didn’t feel like talking about that stuff from the past because it gave me bad dreams.” But she loved the musical when she saw it. She said, “I want to pass the baton, so to speak, to them, and anyone facing a challenge, so they leave the theater standing proud, with their chests out and chins up, inspired to believe ‘I can do it.’ ”