Last Thursday, we lost one of the legendary voices in rock music with the passing of Tina Turner. She was rightfully dubbed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” with an impressive career that spanned back to the 1950s, starting as the lead singer of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Turner was gifted with a raw, unfiltered voice that was a stark contrast to her more gospel-trained contemporaries like Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross. Her singing had a fierce swagger, partly shaped by surviving an abusive marriage with her husband, Ike.
After her split with Ike, Turner was set to prove the Fitzgerald quote “There are no second acts in American lives” wrong with the release of her 1984 album Private Dancer. In one of the great comebacks of musical history, the then 44-year-old Turner soared to the top of the charts with the album’s third single, What’s Love Got to Do with It. While Turner was reshaping herself as a rock musician, What’s Love Got to Do with It was an outlier with its low tempo and synth-pop sound. And Turner’s growling voice, full of world-weariness and pain, was a perfect match for the cynical lyrics of the bittersweet tune.
The song’s success was helped by the glossy music video that was put into heavy rotation on MTV. The clip was directed by Mark Robinson, who had previously produced the Brass in Pocket video for The Pretenders. The video features Turner wearing a pencil skirt and high heels as she struts down a New York City sidewalk full of attitude as she encounters a variety of street players and dancers. It’s a simple, visual video meant to promote the song, but it also showed that the middle-aged Turner had charisma and sex appeal to burn. Turner was known for her sexy legs, and she had no problem showing them off in this new medium.
And it is pure symmetry that Turner made her comeback right in the middle of the MTV revolution, as she was already a natural in front of the camera. Her cameo in the film version of the 1975 rock opera Tommy where she memorably played the “acid queen,” could be considered a proto-music video. In 1985 she made her feature-length acting debut in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome as the villain “Aunt Entity” opposite Mel Gibson. She made for an imposing and muscular screen presence, giving a deliciously nasty performance. Despite meeting with Steven Spielberg to play the Shug Avery role in The Color Purple, Turner never formally acted again, focusing her energies on her music career.
The late ’80s and ’90s were a ripe time for Tina Turner, culminating in 1993 with the movie version of her life story titled…wait for it…What’s Love Got to Do with It. The film features Oscar-nominated performances by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as Tina and Ike Turner, respectively. It’s an engrossing and, at times, brutal watch, never sugarcoating the violent marriage that Turner endured and managed to escape. And it’s a testament that Turner was able to create a musical legacy on her terms and influence generations of artists in the process.
Check out the music video below, and let me know your thoughts in the comments section.