All the resurrections of Tina Turner

The first time Tina Turner was resurrected was when she woke up from a drug overdose and said, “Shit, I'm still here.”

It was 1968 and she was fed up with the brutality of her husband and her artistic partner, Ike Turner.

She was resurrected again in 1976, when, during a night of beatings, she escaped with her belongings from the Dallas hotel where they were staying and took refuge in another one, on the other side of the highway, which she would pay for later.

She did not return to him, not even to enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame together.

She was resurrected once again in 1981, when she decided to tell People

magazine

the hell she had experienced with him: “I wasn't afraid that he would kill me.

She was already dead.”

It was not common to talk about sexist violence in public like this;

public opinion was on his side.

The definitive resurrection came in 1984, when the album

Private Dancer

catapulted her to the stardom that she had already tasted before, but this time alone and choosing songs that she did not write but said things like this: "What does love have to do with this?" “Better be good to me” or “Show some respect.”

Before all that, the young Anna Mae Bullock, who would later adopt the name Tina Turner that Ike gave her, had overcome a childhood marked by poverty in the segregated south of the United States and the abandonment of her parents.

In Saint Louis she became a star thanks to a prodigious voice and unmatched stage presence.

She danced like no one else, even though she was wearing high heels;

It is said that Mick Jagger has based his style on imitating her.

Since she started, she was compared to a beast, because she was wild and sensual, at a time when singers were asked to be more modest.

Following her death in May last year, an urgent documentary was made:

Remembering Tina Turner,

on Amazon Prime Video.

Too urgent: it lasts just over 40 minutes, moves quickly through key moments in her biography and is based above all on the comments of two experts, cultural historian Jennifer Otter Bickerdike and journalist Afua Hagan, with brief quotes from her own singer.

We can barely hear a few seconds of her songs or her most emblematic performances.

It is one of those cheap products that fill the menu of the platforms and seem designed by an algorithm.

Tina

(on Netflix), the ambitious documentary directed by Dan Lindsay and TJ Martin in 2021 with the collaboration of the artist and those around her,

is much more recommendable .

It is the story that she wanted to tell in 2019, as a farewell, when she had already ended her career a decade ago and the musical that bore her name was released.

She looked back without anger.

She already had health problems (which the film does not go into: a stroke, cancer, a kidney transplant).

There is tons of valuable archival material here, she enjoys her music and there are all the important people in her story.

Even the monster Ike (via 2000 interview; died 2007), who appears hesitant and insecure.

He does not admit the abuse, although he did admit that he was unfaithful, and he says from his egocentrism that Tina's problem was this: “She wanted to be what she thought I wanted her to be.”

Ike was as violent and despotic as he was talented.

He was frustrated at not having been recognized as one of the pioneers of rock and roll (which he was with

Rocket 88,

in 1951).

When they met in Saint Louis, Tina pushed her way into her band Kings of Rhythm, so much so that they renamed themselves the Ike and Tina Turner Revue.

It is said here that they got married, above all, so that he could control her better, down to the smallest detail.

When she fled that toxic relationship, it was difficult for her to establish herself alone.

And she had to put up with always being asked if she would get back with Ike.

She began doing cabaret acts in Las Vegas at a time when there were few female references in the rock scene and the disco music fever was going on.

She straightened her career by moving to London: she sensed that in Europe they understood her better.

There she recorded

Private Dancer,

an album that understands her time and reaches a mass audience (two other successful albums would follow:

Break Every Rule

and

Foreign Affair).

In the mid-eighties, she is now able to fill large venues: in Rio she gathered 186,000 people on a historic night in 1988. She then wrote the first volume of her autobiography, which once again confronted her with her past traumas, and which gave She made

her debut as an actress

alongside

Mel Gibson in

Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome:

she was credible representing a fighter in a post-apocalyptic world.

The title of queen of rock, which places her at the level of Elvis Presley, is well deserved, although she exceeded stylistic limits, which did not always help her.

She trained in gospel (that of Baptist churches, although she later became Buddhist) and blues.

Ike says that the music they made together did not fully fit into either the

rhythm and blues

of the black community or the rock of white people.

In her triumphant comeback in the eighties, she adapted to

soft rock,

the kind with as many synthesizers as guitars, which worked well on the radio then and still does on the radio today.

She greatly influenced later pop divas such as Beyoncé and Rihanna.

That finally triumphant Tina carried a trauma: she believed that no one had ever loved her, not even her mother.

Only in 1985, at the age of 46, did she find someone who loved her and took care of her: the Swiss Erwin Bach, so much so that she later donated a kidney to him.

They married in 2013, shortly before she became seriously ill.

They took up residence in Zurich and Tina died as a Swiss, having renounced her American nationality.

This self-portrait of Tina, perhaps aware that it would be her obituary, puts a happy ending to a hard story.

It was more difficult for her to live in peace than to be recognized as a music star and an example of survival.

A few strokes of the brush were not enough to understand her greatness.

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