GEN X REFLEX: WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT
Tina Turner Didn’t Just Survive. She Won.
I knew who Tina Turner was.
Everybody knew who Tina Turner was.
I grew up in a Black family. Tina Turner wasn't somebody who needed an introduction. We knew Ike and Tina. We knew “Proud Mary.” We knew the hair, the legs, the voice, and that woman who seemed physically incapable of simply standing still while music was playing.
Tina was a star.
But to Young Angel?
Tina Turner belonged to yesterday.
Image: Ike & Tina Turner. Source: Wikipedia
I don't mean that disrespectfully. It was just how young people looked at music. There were the artists who belonged to us, and there were the artists our parents already knew. Tina had been famous before I was old enough to care who was famous.
She was part of the music I inherited.
Then came 1984.
And suddenly Tina Turner wasn't yesterday anymore.
She was right now.
THEN I HEARD THAT SONG
“What's Love Got to Do with It.”
Oh, that song.
There are songs you remember liking, and then there are songs your body recognizes before your brain has time to identify them.
That opening comes on and I'm there.
That's the Reflex.
But what happened with Tina was different from some of the other artists I've written about in this series. I didn't hear Tina and then go backward to discover some forgotten artist from the past.
I already knew her.
What I didn't know was that she was about to become one of ours.
Private Dancer arrived in May 1984. “What's Love Got to Do with It” climbed all the way to No. 1 that August and stayed there for three weeks. It became Tina's only solo No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Image: Tina Turner album cover Private Dancer. Source: Spotify
And Tina wasn't some twenty-something newcomer being manufactured for MTV.
She was forty-four years old when the song reached No. 1.
Image: Tina Turner. Source: Shore Fire Media
Think about that.
A Black woman in her forties, already associated with another era of music, whose solo career had struggled for years, suddenly walked into the MTV generation and became one of the hottest stars in the world.
And she didn't come back pretending to be twenty-five.
She came back as Tina Turner.
The hair was bigger.
The skirts might have been smaller.
And those legs...
Image: Tina Turner. Source: Biography.com
Listen.
We cannot have an intellectually serious discussion about Tina Turner and pretend those legs weren't involved.
Them legs.
Tina Turner was sexy as hell.
But there was something different about her sexuality. It wasn't tentative. It didn't feel like she was asking anybody whether she was still allowed to be sexy after forty.
She strutted.
She stomped.
She danced.
She sweated.
She shook that magnificent hair.
She owned every inch of the stage she stood on.
Tina wasn't trying to convince us she was still young.
She was showing us that sexy didn't belong exclusively to young women.
The phoenix didn't rise wearing sensible shoes.
She rose in heels and a miniskirt.
Image: Tina Turner on the cover of Rolling Stone. Source: RollingStone.com
GET ANGEL. PUT THE WIG ON HER.
There's another reason that period is burned into my memory.
I was just beginning to find my own way into entertainment.
I was taking voice lessons. Going to clubs. Sitting in with bands. Doing a little modeling. I traveled around with a group of young people who were all trying, in our own ways, to make our mark.
We also did the kind of performance events that today would probably have a much more sophisticated name.
We lip-synced.
We dressed up.
We performed as artists and characters.
And apparently, somewhere along the way, a decision was made:
Angel is Tina.
I was always the one they put in the Tina Turner wig.
Looking back, I suppose there were worse assignments.
Put on the wig.
Find the attitude.
Get those knees moving.
Commit.
Because there is no halfway version of Tina Turner.
And somewhere underneath all the fun, something else was happening that I couldn't have explained at the time.
Tina Turner had been part of the music I inherited.
Then suddenly, she became part of the woman I was becoming.
THE ROCK WORLD ALREADY KNEW
Years later, my older sister discovered a terrible deficiency in my cultural education.
I had never seen Tommy.
Her response was essentially:
WHAT?
This was back when discovering somebody hadn't seen a movie required action. There was no streaming service. No clicking a button.
You had to go to the video rental store.
Remember those?
So off we went, rented Tommy, and I finally saw the glorious insanity that was Ken Russell's 1975 film of The Who's rock opera.
And there was Tina Turner.
The Acid Queen.
Image: Tina Turner as The Acid Queen in Tommy. Source: Far Out Magazine
Good Lord.
She was courage, magnificence and damn sexy all rolled into one completely crazy performance.
And she threw everything into it.
But something else struck me.
Look at the musical company she was keeping.
This was the world of The Who. The film included Roger Daltrey, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon and other major figures from rock music.
And Tina Turner was standing right there among them.
She wasn't visiting rock ’n’ roll.
She belonged there.
Her Acid Queen album that same year pushed even further into rock, with Tina taking on material associated with The Who, the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Decades later, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame would describe her as an artist who shattered barriers for Black women in rock and moved freely through R&B, rock and pop.
Watching Tommy years later made me realize something:
The rock world already knew.
Tina's 1980s success wasn't the world suddenly discovering that Tina Turner could be a rock star.
Rock stars already knew Tina Turner was a rock star.
The rest of us were catching up.
WE KNEW HER STORY
There's something else about the Tina Turner story that I think gets lost when we talk about how information traveled before the internet.
We knew.
Not everything. Not every detail. We couldn't pull a phone out of our pockets and disappear down a celebrity rabbit hole for three hours.
There was no Deadline alert.
There was no social media feed.
But we knew Tina's story.
And in my family, I knew because women talked.
My mother had survived abuse herself. She got away from my father and raised her younger children on her own.
Women like my mother understood something about Tina Turner that didn't require a celebrity news site to explain it.
They knew what leaving could cost.
And they made sure their daughters knew.
Tina also began speaking publicly about the abuse before the great comeback. Her landmark 1981 People interview put parts of that story into the national conversation years before Private Dancer.
So when Tina rose again, some of us weren't discovering what she had survived.
We already knew what she had survived.
That's why we understood what we were looking at.
The world could say:
She's back.
Women who understood what leaving meant could look at Tina and see something else.
She got out.
BUT GETTING OUT WASN'T THE END
That's the part of Tina's story that means more to me now than it could have when I was young.
We love to tell survival stories as though escape is the ending.
Person suffers.
Person finds courage.
Person leaves.
Music swells.
Credits.
Except that's not how life works.
Sometimes getting out is where the next difficult part begins.
After leaving Ike in 1976, Tina had to rebuild a career. The years before Private Dancer included television appearances, Vegas and cabaret-style work and a long stretch without major chart success. Her path back accelerated when her recording of “Ball of Confusion” led to work with the British Electric Foundation circle, and then her version of Al Green's “Let's Stay Together” became a hit. Capitol wanted an album. Her manager Roger Davies and a group of collaborators helped assemble what became Private Dancer.
This wasn't magic.
It was rebuilding.
And then came the song Tina didn't even particularly want to record.
“What's Love Got to Do with It.”
Producer and co-writer Terry Britten later recalled that Tina struggled with its vulnerability. Yet that vulnerability became part of what made the record extraordinary.
And then the woman the industry could easily have filed away as yesterday's star went to No. 1.
That next Grammy night was practically a coronation. “What's Love Got to Do with It” won Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, while “Better Be Good to Me” won Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.
Read that last one again.
Rock.
There she was.
SHE WON
This is the part I keep coming back to.
Tina Turner survived.
That's true.
Tina Turner escaped.
That's true.
Tina Turner rebuilt.
Also true.
But none of those words quite says it.
She won.
She actually won.
She didn't merely find enough work to support herself after leaving.
She didn't spend the rest of her career trading on nostalgia.
She didn't become a footnote attached permanently to the man who had hurt her.
She became Tina Turner.
Not Ike and Tina.
Tina.
A global superstar.
A rock star.
A movie star.
A woman over forty standing in the middle of a youth-obsessed industry saying, in effect:
Watch me.
And we did.
Tina didn't rebuild the career she'd lost.
She built a bigger one.
That matters.
Because survival eventually asks another question:
What are you going to do with the life you saved?
Tina answered the hell out of that question.
THEN THEY SHOWED US THE STORY
By the time What's Love Got to Do with It reached theaters in 1993, Gen X had spent years watching Tina's second act.
Image: What's Love Got To Do With It, movie poster. Source: IMDb
We knew the superstar.
Then Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne took us backward.
Image: Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Source: Rotten Tomatoes.
The film was based on Tina's autobiography, I, Tina, and it dramatized the rise, the abuse, the breaking point, the escape and the rebuilding that preceded the woman we'd watched conquer the 1980s.
Image: I, Tina book cover. Source: Wikipedia
And Tina was involved, although not quite in the way we might imagine today.
She wasn't the film's producer controlling every frame, and the movie compressed and altered parts of her life. But she had told her story in the book on which it was based, visited the production, corrected details when she was there, lent clothing to the production, and re-recorded vocals used for the film. She also insisted that her story not be turned into a sanitized puff piece. At the same time, she had no desire to sit through a dramatization of violence she'd actually lived.
That distinction matters.
The movie wasn't a documentary.
But Tina had already claimed her own story.
And now millions of people could see something that those of us watching the triumphant Tina of the 1980s might not fully have understood:
What it had cost her to become that woman.
The movie didn't give us a superhero who never broke.
It showed a woman who could be frightened.
Desperate.
Hurt.
Lost.
And still eventually stand.
That was more powerful.
Because Tina Turner didn't show us what it looked like to be invincible.
She showed us what it looked like to become.
I WANTED TO BE TINA TURNER
I didn't just admire Tina Turner.
She was what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I said it then.
I still say it now.
Not because I wanted her fame.
Okay, I wasn't going to turn down the hair.
And if somebody had offered me those legs, we'd have had a conversation.
But that wasn't really it.
I wanted to be that kind of woman.
A woman who could walk onto a stage and own it.
A woman who didn't ask permission to be powerful, talented, sexy or loud.
A woman who could sing rock without stopping to ask whether somebody thought she belonged there.
A woman who could be feminine without making herself small.
A woman who could break and still become something after the breaking.
Young Angel couldn't have articulated all of that.
Young Angel knew one thing:
Put the wig on me.
Adult Angel understands what was happening underneath it.
I wasn't only imitating Tina Turner's performance.
I was trying on possibility.
SHE STILL IS
Tina Turner died in 2023.
But I've been thinking about what it means when we say someone had an impact on a generation.
It doesn't always mean they were born into our generation.
Sometimes they arrived from somewhere before us and showed us something we needed to see.
Tina showed Gen X a woman who had already lived an entire life before many of us really discovered her.
She had succeeded.
She had broken.
She had become desperate.
She had survived.
And then, at an age when the entertainment business often starts deciding what women are no longer allowed to be, Tina Turner became bigger.
Louder.
Sexier.
Freer.
Entirely herself.
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame eventually inducted Tina as a solo performer in 2021, recognizing the woman who had spent decades demolishing the boundaries between R&B, rock and pop.
But I think Young Angel had already cast her vote.
I wanted to be Tina Turner when I grew up.
And now, I can tell you something funny.
I still do.
Maybe growing up was never about reaching an age.
Maybe it's about continuing to become.
Tina did.
And she taught some of us that surviving wasn't the end of the story.
You could get out.
You could rebuild.
You could reinvent yourself after forty.
You could put on the heels.
You could walk back onto the stage.
You could take your name, your voice, your body and your life back.
And sometimes...
you could f*@&ing win.
Tina Turner did.
God, did she ever.
Sources
Recording Academy / GRAMMY: Private Dancer at 40 and the 27th Annual GRAMMY Awards.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame: Tina Turner's 2021 solo induction and musical legacy.
Los Angeles Times, 1993: reporting from the production of What's Love Got to Do with It, including Tina Turner's involvement and the film's departures from her biography.
Recording Academy / GRAMMY: Tina Turner's career resurgence and the history of “What's Love Got to Do with It.”