‘TINA WAS SO PUNK’

TINA TURNER, to me, is a living, breathing phoenix, a symbol of resurrection. A career like that, a successful career, where it all goes away and comes back bigger and stronger and brighter? That doesn’t happen very often. That’s what I love about Tina most. The music’s amazing. The performing is amazing, but this story arc of her incredible life — from food stamps to icon status, she never gave up.

The first time I saw Tina on television, my mom was like, “This is really important. You need to see this.” And it was legs, and hair, and running all over the place. It was ferocious. I’d never seen anything like it. For my mother, she symbolized power and strength. Because life for my mother wasn’t easy. A lot of pain, a lot of heartbreak, a lot of suffering. And Tina stood out to all of the women who were going through that.

I want to actually see more older, wiser people getting their chance to tell their story in popular media. Seeing Tina in my life from such a young age — a woman acting like that, singing like that, sweating, and having muscles, having no care in the world, and having this freedom — I know what that did for me as a young girl, and then as I was growing into a woman.

She was obviously the best part of Ike and Tina. That song “Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter” is my jam because she’s talking all this smack about Ike. He could have wrote any of them songs for anybody else and it would’ve been nothing to really marvel at. But because you got Tina in the mix, that’s what turns those songs on.

A Black woman singing rock & roll was hugely inspiring to me as someone who also wants to express myself in a loud, bold way. As a performer, I was inspired by Tina taking up all of that space as a Black woman: taking risks, paying no mind, finding her freedom. She didn’t need any validation. She was powerful. It was subversive as hell. It was so punk. She was more rock & roll than rock & roll even knew what to do with. Here’s this Black woman, muscular and strong, just absolutely wiping the floor with everyone else. That’s badass, and courageous.