Happy Birthday, Tina Turner: Pop's Ultimate Comeback Queen Turns 80
“As I’m about to turn 80, I’d like to think I’ve become wise in some ways,” Tina Turner just told Rolling Stone. But there’s never been a revival like Tina’s Eighties comeback. She became a solo superstar when she was 44. Things like that just don’t happen. (For context: That’s how old Lauryn Hill, Andre 3000, Mark Ronson, and Jack White are now.)
None of it happened the easy way. Tina’s always been a fighter, because she had to be. I remember hearing the WBCN DJ introduce this brand new hit by “the world’s hottest grandmother,” in the summer of 1984, and I could not believe my ears. This voice rasping, “What’s love got to do, got to do with it” — a grandma? This woman had lived. She’d gone through some grown-up shit. Every feeling you’d ever had, in your petty little teenage life? To her, it was just another second-hand emotion.
Her life just hit Broadway as the musical Tina. She began as half of Ike and Tina Turner — she was the cover star of Rolling Stone’s second issue, in November 1967. As the world should have guessed, but didn’t, this marriage was a torture chamber. But it’s the grown-up Tina we celebrate today. When she broke free with Private Dancer in 1984, she did more than just reboot her career. She became a whole new kind of pop star, defining middle-aged cool. Like another veteran born in the 1930s who came back strong in the Eighties, her fellow Nicheren Buddhist devotee, Leonard Cohen, she never tried to hide her age. Instead, she flaunted all the aches and bruises in her voice.
Nobody else could have done “Private Dancer,” her heart-wrenching ballad of an aging sex worker. As she just told Rolling Stone, the song “tells the story of women like me, caught up in sad situations, who somehow find a way to go on.” It was written by Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler, never exactly regarded as a feminist icon, but in this song he did for strip clubs what “Sultans of Swing” did for mediocre trumpet players. Tina rattles off credit card options as she leans on the pole and leers to the listener-as-john: “Do you wanna see me do the shimmy again?” Jesus. Wow. No, thanks. Have a chair, ma’am.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/tina-turner-birthday-tribute-916227/
