Tina Turner in the House

Tina Turner in concert at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in Oakland, California, October 1985. Credit: Pat Johnson/MediaPunch

The moment I heard Tina Turner died, I thought of my mother. I’ve been thinking about them both all week. In 1984, when Turner’s legendary album, Private Dancer, came out, I was in third grade, and I can remember, as clearly as though it were yesterday, sitting in the soft velour backseat of my mother’s beige Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, singing along to the hits the local pop radio station played: “Better Be Good to Me,”  “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” and that soulful, sensual title number, “Private Dancer.” I loved these songs; to me they were wonderful enigmas that spoke of adult secrets I might someday grasp. As the news of Turner’s death spread throughout social media this past week, I saw numerous people expressing the sadness I felt: her music, it was said, formed the soundtrack of our 1980s youth. This was true, but the feeling for me was more specific. Turner’s most famous hits didn’t just range over the usual pop tropes of infatuation, love, and heartbreak. She sang about falling in love with men you were savvy enough to know weren’t good for you, about carnal desire in the absence of romantic love, about working a soulless job entirely for the money. They were adult songs for adult women, and they formed the soundtrack to my mother’s life as a single working woman rebuilding her life after divorce in the 1980s, just as Turner herself had once, along with countless other newly independent women of that era.  Her sexy, captivating music spoke to female listeners who were left cold by a lot of treacly, youth-oriented 80s pop music.

Private Dancer would dominate the charts for nine months, eventually selling more than 20 million copies worldwide, and remaining in heavy radio rotation for the rest of my adolescence and young adulthood. At the time, my mom was 34 years old. She and my father had split two years earlier, and she was raising my two younger sisters and me (ages eight, seven, and three) alone, with the dubious help of a revolving troupe of teenaged babysitters. We had recently moved from Bloomington, Illinois back to Bettendorf, Iowa, where my mom had grown up and her parents still lived.  For what seemed like ages, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture in the living room of our rented house, save for one of those upright, glass-door stereos you could buy at Kmart or Target. It looked like R2-D2 when lit up. Inside, lay a small handful of records of the moment, among them Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which also debuted in 1984, and Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer.” I remember staring endlessly at that album cover, on which Turner appears in a black leotard and matching heels, her long legs, of which she was clearly proud, clad in fishnet tights and arranged to glorious effect.

To afford the rent, my mom sublet the downstairs bedroom to a boarder. At first, we were joined by a glamorous blond woman who wore a lot of eyeshadow and, like my mother, worked in corporate America; she had a devoted boyfriend who often came over and would sing my sisters and me an uncanny rendition of “Surfin’ Bird,” complete with all the sound effects, which we found absolutely hilarious. Later, a distant cousin came to live with us; she spent many afternoons sprawled out on the floor of that vacant carpeted room, listening to Tina and Bruce on the turntable while drinking bottled beer, to my mother’s great dismay. On weekends, these women, along with my mom’s best friend—all of them in their late twenties or early thirties and single, with the feathered hair and ersatz Princess Diana wardrobe of the period—would gather in our matchbox kitchen, eat pizza, drink boxed wine, and hoot with laughter about their lives: horrible bosses, erratic ex-husbands, competitive male colleagues. Sometimes, they’d get ready for a night out together and joke about the men they were dating, but always in code—in those days, children and adults occupied wholly separate fiefdoms. Listening to these women I idolized talk (often I was flat eavesdropping, crouched behind a doorframe in the hallway, a child sleuth fascinated by the esoterica of adulthood) gave me the same pleasantly dazed feeling I got from listening to Turner’s music, which I could only decode in patches. Turner’s songs became, for me, impossible to disentangle from my memories of these women.

                                                           

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TINA TURNER WAS 44 years old when Private Dancer was released. I find this astonishing given how thoroughly the music industry prizes youth, particular when it comes to female pop stars. But rewatch the videos for Turner’s major hits and her live performances of those years, as I spent the past few days doing, and the age of this electrifying woman doesn’t even enter your mind. You see only how spectacularly sui generis she was, with her powerful, husky voice, her kinetic energy, her signature look of teased punk hairdo and sky-high miniskirts: a comet from another solar system. On stage, she struts around like Mick Jagger (in a 1984 Letterman interview, she winkingly admits to teaching Mick his dance moves while on tour with him in the 60s), magnetic in her earthy awareness of her sex appeal. She is so comfortable in her own skin that the parameters of mere mortals—like age—seem not to apply to her. “There is no strict regimen that says when you are in your late 40s you cannot wear a minidress,” she once said, in her regal way. Watching her dance in those exhilarating live shows, which were as much a factor in her superstardom as her radio hits, you see someone who feels no limits on the self.

From that moment on, there seemed to be no limits on her career, either. Private Dancer won four Grammy Awards and established Turner as the global celebrity she would remain for the rest of her days—a touring sensation who, in 1988, broke Frank Sinatra’s record for the ‘largest paying audience for a solo artist’ when 180,000 fans packed into the Maracanã Stadium to see her in Rio de Janeiro. In 1985, she starred alongside a hunky young Mel Gibson in the movie Mad Max Thunderdome, for which she sang the massive pop hit, “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” and made the villainous, post-apocalyptic ruler Aunty Entity—a part written for her—a memorably likable antihero. In 1986 and 1989, she put out two more successful albums, Break Every Rule and Foreign Affair, respectively; the latter included “The Best,” a rousing ballad that would become a kind of personal anthem for Turner, and has been used in countless ads and promos, most famously for Pepsi.  In 1986, Turner also published (with Kurt Loder) her autobiography, I, Tina, a frank, unstudied account of her rise to fame: from her modest beginnings as “Anna Mae Bullock,” the child of cotton farmers in tiny Nutbush, Tennessee, to her notoriously abusive first marriage to musical partner Ike Turner. The book inspired the 1993 biopic What’s Love Got to Do with It, starring Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne, with Turner recording yet another major hit single, “I Don’t Wanna Fight,” for the film’s soundtrack. Like “The Best,” “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” and several of her other epic songs, “I Don’t Wanna Fight” is a pop classic that feels timeless, like it has always existed as a part of American pop culture.

On this recent listening, I found her 80s-era hits newly extraordinary. Turner didn’t write the lyrics for them, but she chose what she sang, and she “put her superhuman energy into her unique interpretation of songs,” as Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, who wrote the single “Private Dancer,” tweeted this week. Her distinctive smoky voice, rasping with all her life experience and her many years of performing, infused those songs with the worldliness—one might say world-weariness—of a woman who had dealt with her share of heartache. “Private Dancer,” sung from the point of view of a cabaret dancer or perhaps a stripper, is remarkable for its fierce pragmatism. Turner sings, “I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money/ I'll do what you want me to do,” and “Deutsche Marks or dollars/American Express will do nicely, thank you.” It’s a melancholy song about resigning yourself to making a living, even as your bleak job drains your spirit. “Better Be Good to Me,” is a similarly shrewd number, but sung by a woman who knows her own worth and has run out of patience for lowlifes. “‘Cause I don’t have time for your overloaded lies,” she says, “‘Cause I don’t have no use for what you loosely call the truth”—a wry, smart lyric I adore.

And then there’s Turner’s biggest hit, “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” Here, the female narrator-singer has reached a kind of cynical enlightenment. This number-one single made Turner, at only 44, the oldest solo female artist ever to rise to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 (a title later taken by Cher). It’s fitting that the song is about a woman who can no longer summon any youthful idealism, even while her arch stance is obviously a form of armor. “What’s love but a sweet old-fashioned notion,” she sings, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?” I will never forget overhearing my mom on the phone repeating those lyrics to a female friend of hers—I had never known her to talk about pop music before and I never have since—then saying, “It’s so true.”

                                                                       

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TURNER’S SOLO CAREER was very hard won. The story of how she left Ike Turner is by now familiar: In 1976, after 16 years of an increasingly abusive marriage, during which she performed with his band, Kings of Rhythm, and then in the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Turner escaped by sneaking out of a Dallas Hotel room. Wearing a blood-spattered white Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit, she ran across a busy freeway, finding refuge in a Ramada Inn; she had only 36 cents and a Mobil credit card in her pocket. She phoned a lawyer friend, who helped her get to Los Angeles, where she began the arduous process of piecing her life back together. While finalizing her divorce two years later, she asked only to keep the stage name Ike had given her: “no money, no house, no half-interest to the fruits of the labor of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue,” as Greg Bordelon writes in Bloomberg Law. She knew the value of her name, that its familiarity would allow her to rebuild her career, and perhaps she savored the irony of owning the designation Ike himself had created, arguably to control her. It was still almost a decade before her wildly popular hits, and in the meantime Turner—she of the magnificent voice that had belted out “River Deep–Mountain High”—took a cleaning job to pay rent. She sang at cabaret shows in Las Vegas and appeared on television variety shows like “Hollywood Squares.” Finally, in late 1983, with her successful cover of Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together,” she went from nostalgia act to comeback artist. Capitol Records now wanted a complete studio album from Turner, and gave her two weeks to record it. But for her, Private Dancer was not a revival, a reinvention, a return. She called it “my debut.”

As I made my way through the cascade of obituaries this week, I noticed a reluctance to discuss this turbulent period of her life, an impulse I found misplaced. Why should we tiptoe around details about which Turner herself had been so courageously outspoken and candid? In December 1981, roughly two and a half years before Private Dancer came out, she gave an interview to Carl Arrington, the music editor of People, recounting, for the first time, the harrowing physical and mental abuse she had suffered at the hands of Ike, who beat her until her face was swollen and demanded she make breakfast for the entire band at 4 a.m. “When I left, I was living a life of death,” she said, “I didn’t exist. I didn’t fear him killing me when I left, because I was already dead.” Reading this, I thought of what my own mother once told me when I was an adult and could understand: “It got to the point that I needed to leave, or I might as well have lain on the ground and let him drive the car over me.”

Domestic abuse was rarely discussed in the early 1980s, and not by celebrities in magazines. Turner was among the first to break the stigma. In doing so, she not only helped dispel the collective shame and silence that surrounded the subject, she made it clear that abuse happened not just to poor women, but to wealthy and famous women, too. In the 2021 documentary Tina, Turner said that she was so apprehensive about doing that pivotal interview, she asked her psychic if it would end her career. “No, Tina,” Turner recalls the psychic saying, “It’s going to do just the opposite. It’s going to break everything wide open.”

It did. Still, I want to end with her music, since it’s her music that rendered the story of her life so exceptional. It was also, ultimately, her music that “made her an inspiration for women of all ages and social classes,” as Knopfler put it—as well as for many, many men—and it’s the reason we have spent the past week celebrating her life and mourning her death. When I hear one of her songs, I am right back in that rented house, standing in the bathroom watching my recently divorced mom and her friends apply their makeup in the mirror, clip on their big costume earrings, and hairspray their curling-ironed hair as they get ready to go out for the evening. Meanwhile, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” floats from our living room. “Rock songs inspire you to release whatever the frustrations, and help to go on in life,” Turner once said. Turner taught generations of women that you could cast off your past frustrations and reinvent yourself: after divorce, after abuse, and at any age, no matter what society tells you. Like Turner, ever the dancer, ever the fighter, you could go on in life.