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Tina Turner’s 11 Essential Songs

Like all great pop icons, Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of 83, had multiple lives.

She started out as an R&B shouter and inexhaustible dancer, putting on the most exhilarating live show alongside her husband, Ike, alongside James Brown. She then toured with the Rolling Stones and became a rock heroine, where she served as the Acid Queen of The Who. And finally she became the ultimate survivor. Her abused woman left her man behind and took the crown for herself without apology.

Here are some of Tina Turner’s best musical moments on record and film.

Ike and Tina’s early R&B hits are shocking moments of raw musical power, but in retrospect, their lyrical content is also quite eerie. The duo’s first single introduces Tina’s extraordinary howl, making her sing about a troubled relationship where she was abused by a man and “made me smile when my heart was broken”, but still She has promised me that she will do whatever he wants. These words were written by Ike Turner, who has sole credit as a songwriter.

More bizarre and offensive lyrics: Tina professes idolatry instead of love, instead saying, “I know you can get over me with just a little bit of attention.” Tina’s guttural yells over a walking bass line were the sexiest, most unfiltered sounds in music at the time, but now listening to these songs, Tina’s later Ike It’s almost impossible to listen without flinching to a horror show about marrying a .

Ike & Tina’s biggest early hit (which reached No. 2 on Billboard’s R&B chart and made it into the Top 20 pop) is a light-hearted back-and-forth routine about a couple overcoming their troubles. Wow again. But at least the song wasn’t by Ike this time. The song was written by Rose Marie McCoy, Joe Seneca and James Lee and recorded by R&B duo Mickey & Sylvia.

Phil Spector is watching the Ike & Tina Turner Revue (an amazingly high-energy live show in which Tina sings and dances with backup Iketes), and Spector says Jeff Barry, Ellie Wrote the single with Greenwich and recorded it for his own label, Phils. It softens Tina’s howls and replaces Ike’s tight band with a slightly hazy version of Spector’s signature “wall of sound.” The single was unsuccessful, and the album of the same title was delayed for three years in the United States.

“We never do nice and easy. We always do nice and rough.” I introduced the song and it came in 4th place. After running through her first few verses of stripped-down “nice and easy” verses, she joins forces with a full band, complete with horns and Ikette, to finish.

Tina, who is credited as the sole songwriter, details her upbringing in rural Tennessee, telling for the first time her own story of “going to the fields on weekdays and having a picnic on Labor Day.” The song is performed as an acid girlfriend funk, with the then electric girlfriend keyboards and a Moog solo. But the song is still nothing more than a fantasy, never imagining a life beyond small-town rusticity.

In The Who’s film version of Tommy, Tina was cast as the Acid Queen, a “gypsy” with a wild scream and trembling lips who uses sex and drugs to cure a boy. At this point, Tina was a world-famous sex symbol and her name alone was an abbreviation for female power. It didn’t take long for her to leave Ike. But the world didn’t know her secret for years.

By the 1980s, Tina was in her 40s, well past Ike, and her brand was Survival. The songs on her groundbreaking solo album Private Dancer, written mostly by men, fit the role of an independent woman who doesn’t want to be alone. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” tells the story of a broken hearted woman who is tempted but afraid to try again with love, a “second-hand feeling.”

About confidence and rebellious demands on men, the song was co-written with Holly Knight and originally released by her band. Spider. But ever since then, the song has been Tina’s, and she not only declares to her, “What you loosely call truth is of no use to me,” but “should do it? “

Tina donned a white mane and post-apocalyptic tribal outfit in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome co-starring Mel Gibson. The theme song is squeaky ’80s torch pop, but Tina is still in costume in the music video.

original recorder Bonnie Tyler, “The Best” is a hymn to a lover. But if you squint or sing along as a fan of hers, it could be an anthem to Tina herself. “You’re just the best, better than anyone else.”

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