Perspective | Tina Turner sang beyond her pain
Either way, this friction is responsible for some of the most spontaneous music produced by the human body – and since we know so much about what this sound has been through, we can Visible majesty expresses itself in the most serious way: the voice of one who knows pain
turner, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83 in Switzerland.Having endured such a brutal life, we can only wonder if all the books, memoirs, Hollywood dramatizations and documentaries have plumbed its depths completely. At least this much we know: Turner was tortured by her husband and bandleader, Ike Turner, for years during her rise to fame, but she finally escaped from a Texas hotel room in 1976. which contained nothing more than 36 cents. Mobile credit card in his pocket. Then, less than a decade later, Tina Turner made one of the biggest public comebacks in pop music history, the indelible voice that helped her 1984 album, “Private Dancer,” go multi-platinum.
As she found success in the ’80s, you could also hear a new joy in her singing – a quality that hasn’t been felt so much since.The river is deep, the mountain is high.A signature Ike and Tina song from 1966, co-written and co-produced by “Wall of Sound” man Phil Spector. Apparently, Spector pulled Ike away from that terrible recording session, then encouraged Tina to tone down the explosiveness, allowing her to squeeze more melody into the lyrics. Listen to how she splits the gap as she sings the words “higher” and “deeper” as if she’s using all of her being to reach those extremes. “I was excited about singing a different kind of song,” she explained matter-of-factly in “Tina,” a full-on and 2021 Documentary Revealed. “It was the freedom to do something different.”
As his music became more expressive, he refused to abandon his sense of discipline. In concert, Turner’s presence was beyond electric: she moved through the stages as if she were trying to punch holes in them. Early in her career, she worried about being dismissed as a singing dancer, but wondered what was happening in those moments when a pair of lungs pumped oxygen to the body non-stop. was fulfilling the dual responsibilities of And Delivering “Proud Mary” as the tempo quickens to ecstasy. Turner tended to shrug off these superpowers. “The body is a machine,” he told The Washington Post in 1993. “You train it to do what you want it to do.”
In the 80s, he coached her to sing the biggest hits of her career. When “What’s love got to do with it?” First hitting the airwaves, the shrill humanity of Turner’s voice immediately set itself apart from all the plush, sleek synthesizer textures that were saturating radio circa 1984—even those that he and Her producer chose her for the song. He pulled the same magic trick a year later, scaling the charts with “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),” a volcanic hit from the “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” soundtrack. There is still a voice that knew pain, but now also one that escaped it. It looked worn, and rough, but more than anything, alive.