Tina Turner - Classic or Dud?

In fact, I have an aunt that does this.

Usually to 'The Best' - surely one of the most hideous songs ever written.

Tina Turner - looks to me like she's escaped from a Ty Phoo advert - and a granny in thick supporting tights and a frightwig - never good.

Ike & Tina amazing stuff.
Private Dancer - one of the defining albums of the 80s (and my first big concert age 11 or so)
she was Auntie Entity - you try walking around in the desert wearing a chainmail outfit that weighs 80 pounds. that's tough.

more recent stuff hasn't done much for me tho thought the song she did for the biopic was pretty good.

Die, Grandma, die!

(on the other hand there're also things like "Proud Mary"...)

It's official: ILM hates black people.

(Sorry for the non-racism, Dan. But keep hope alive!)

Or has she done that already.....?

one of the best all time performers EVER. but saying that, i dont know how many of ike and tina turners songs i actually like, apart from nutbush city limits, proud mary, river deep mountain high and maybe one or two others. maybe i just dont know enough. but seeing them live must have been phenomenal, going on the dvds ive seen.

"ike turner beats tina to death"- i've just seen this headline.

come on you sons of bitchez

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJGoNeM3WzY

Even fucking Iggy Pop couldn't do better than that you better kick your sexist ass out of town

PRIVATE DANCER

Dud. totally ruined Let's Stay Together.

Classic! What the fuck? So many haters! I seriously need to buy that Private Dancer album.

― Anthony Miccio (Anthony Miccio), Sunday, May 25, 2003 3:18 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

good Lord, miccio is 1,000% OTM here, overriding even the otherwise unimpeachable alex in nyc. (the rest of her solo stuff, except for the "thunderdome" song, is admittedly meh.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC41K6lL6GY

Classic for Thunderdome. Keep only what's necessary to make her performance in Thunderdome possible. Private Dancer, too. Also classic for Ike's line, "I'm only doin this cuz I love you, baby."

(i should've been more clear ... the private dancer album and the "thunderdome" song are absolute classics from her solo career; what came AFTER that, though, is kinda meh. obv. the stuff with Ike and some of the solo stuff before private dancer is also totally classic.)

Two Tina thread revivals! You're excited!

I love Break Every Rule's "Typical Male" and "What You Get is What You See."

Tina rulez. saw her last year and she's still got it. plus she had a huge Thunderdome set for just the one track. so OTT!

Only found out recently that she did a cover of Robert Palmer's great "Johnny and Mary" (buried on the soundtrack to the film Summer Lovers), and it may be my favourite version of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUiOKwxQ3Yk

wow

i thought this bump would be related to the kygo thing :( he really needs to stop

Upcoming documentary

https://www.hbo.com/documentaries/tina

Tina rulez. saw her last year and she's still got it. plus she had a huge Thunderdome set for just the one track. so OTT!

― I'm A Genius, Too! (Jamie_ATP), Sunday, July 10, 2011 3:08 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I still haven't seen the movie, but I've been obsessed with this song lately and this just adds to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuO_8VlYAfk

first episode of the doc is great

the way it starts, with her explaining she didn’t want there to be a story of her life because “it wasn’t a good life” is a punch to the gut.

What you get is what you see!

oh man. i watched the whole thing. it’s devastating.

At least she has found some happiness and satisfaction late in life

i cried so much

really beautifully done, its so powerful hearing her story in her voice

i am sad to say goodbye to her but love that she is doing it, she has given so much of herself

i don't think it's a first episode, is it? wasn't that the whole thing? It was good.

look at all these bad takes at the start of this thread

It was the whole thing; I was confused.

At least she has found some happiness and satisfaction late in life

― curmudgeon, Sunday, March 28, 2021 10:33 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is true, but i think what i valued so much about the doc (and what broke my heart) is how honest she was about how hard her life post-Ike was...saying that the good in her life didn't necessarily outweigh the bad. it refused to be a triumphant resilience story, even though, of course, she's a survivor and has accomplished amazing things. and so much of the footage of her, either being interviewed alongside Ike or alone afterward, bore witness to her tortured feelings about their relationship. the most chilling footage was where she would just go kind of blank and withdraw into herself. i really appreciate how the doc refused to gloss over the long-term toll Ike's abuse took.

i think it's amazing that she succeeded in becoming a huge star in a different musical mode than R&B, as she wanted to, but it felt melancholy to me that all the amazing footage of her dancing and singing while she was with Ike must feel so fraught and tainted to her--those performances are so amazing! but he shaped them and even gave her her name!

i also didn't know about her mother and father. it's just such a sad story.

I had no idea she was having so many health problems:

"Like all documentaries produced with the cooperation of its subject, there are blind spots in Tina. Now age 81, Turner has struggled with health problems. She had a stroke in 2013, was diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and had a kidney transplant – donated by [her husband Erwin] Bach – in 2017. But none of that is mentioned in the film."

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/27/979683306/tina-turners-life-explored-in-new-documentary

I had forgotten that Bucks Fizz were the first to record What's Love Got To Do With It.

Re Tina playing South Africa, had a vague memory of this from reading I Tina for a college class and if I recall correctly the South Africa tour was right after divorce when Tina was saddled with all the debts to promoters, IRS etc and supporting 4 kids and taking any job she could get.

She later described herself as naive about the South Africa situation - knowing it was segregated but feeling ‘well I grew up in a segregated country, and the shows are integrated, not white only’ and she later turned down offers from Sun City and other gigs and apologized.

OK, google tells me shows were in 79 and knew Dusty Springfield was deported from South Africa in 64 for insisting her shows be integrated, and I just found out Gram Parsons quit the Byrds in 68 rather than play in South Africa so there were def. people who were aware enuf but others continued to play even after the UN Cultural Boycott came into effect in 1980.

(Side note, my passport growing up had a stamp in it - good for all countries except South Africa - and the first Olympics old enuf to remember watching ’76 Montreal was boycotted by most African countries to protest New Zealand’s participation as they were breaking the sports boycott with the All Blacks playing in South Africa)

Reason I’d originally come back to thread was I found myself oddly moved yesterday when looking at the Martyn Ware twitter thread Ned had posted above.

He’d been happily posting about football and going to Wembley, then posted “Tina’s gone” and then there was an hour gap before next post when he paid tribute to her. It just felt like he saw the news, had to say something and then gather himself before writing a statement.

Thread

I have a story about Tina Turner. I worked for CBS News in the 1990s, and one assignment I had at "60 Minutes" was to watch old raw (unedited) interview footage, for some reason I can't recall. So I watched the raw footage of a 1996 Mike Wallace interview with Tina Turner.

— Leslie Molson (@lesliemolson) May 25, 2023

https://t.co/YRY0NBJZU9

Wow

Lizzo. Did. That.

That’s a fucking tribute. 💜pic.twitter.com/6FAAf9M9Ft

— LoLo Vonz (@LoLoVonz) May 26, 2023

this is wild and awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtejfVN_tGc

Sirius/XM's Soul Town channel #49 is all-Tina for at least today!

Sirius/XM is also free this weekend for curious how listeners.

They just played this Bowie-penned number:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmvpZd1Bn5

^^"Girls", from Break Every Rule

That Lizzo clip is amazing.

Barely remember this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGHxjBftF_w

TIL that Ike & Tina borrowed half of their "Proud Mary" arrangement from the Checkmates Ltd.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvMGW9dLQVg

as C grisso mentioned, Soultown on sirius XM, which is ostensibly concerned with the soul diaspora from, say, 1961-1975, has been the Tina channel since saturday. I've heard "A Fool in Love" twice, a very clearly not 1963 recorded remake of "It's Gonna Work Out fine," "Nutbush City Limits" (i do love that moog break) each once, and "Proud Mary" and "River Deep" not once… the overwhelming majority played is the Private Dancer and post-Private dancer music… and since I never fucked with her 90s shit, hearing whatever song she does with Barry White is a treat! as is her version of "Unfinished Sympathy"… but its giving me the impression that, unlike peers like Aretha, before P.D., she doesn't have a lot of hugely enduring hits…like, have normies who like soul/R&B ever heard "A Fool In love?" or is it like expecting said normies to know "Rocket 88"? It appears that before P.D., her legacy rests on her live show, where she would do Stones covers or whatever songs happened to be big that she could do nice andf rough… what other songs did she do prior to PD other than the five I mention above could someone interested in R&B in the 1960s reasonably be expected to know?

and when I hear "The best" or "Steamy Windows," it makes me think that she must have had access to the same pool of songs and songwriters that Cher had in the late 80s… I can hear Tina doing ""heart of Stone" or " I Found Someone," same production ethic, same everything, really…

Ace of Base's "Don't Turn Around" was written for and performed by Tina.

Re your original point: no, she was never in the U.S. a major crossover artist other than the exceptions.

She is NOT Aretha.

this is wild and awesome

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown)

there's a special place in my heart for tina turner singing "gonna give you every inch of my dick"

wow there are dogshit opinions at the beginning of this thread

saw a cool post on facebook, paraphrasing:

the jist was "Nutbush City Limits" was a big hit in Australia the year that AC/DC formed. It was also apparently the first song they asked Brian Johnson to sing during his audition for the band. Listening through that lens the influence is very apparent especially in the guitar riff/tone...Johnson is such a dude I wouldn't think Tina until now but I could definitely see her influence on him.

hadn't heard this one before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPZFBU_aUVo
Tina Turner - Unfinished Sympathy (Extended Olympic Mix)

I didn’t hear it until after she passed, but the original mix of her take on “Unfinished Sympathy” was really kind of an eye opener for me. I think I had a tendency to think of her post-PD material as a bit of a “Well, it’s nice she had the chance to come back and get her due” thing. But she certainly gives an incredible performance here that, if it doesn’t necessarily surpass Shara Nelson’s certainly matches its power and intensity – while also having a certain resonance because it’s Tina. The same is true of that performances linked upthread of “We Don’t Need Another Hero” and “Help.”

In retrospect, its kind of hilarious that Xgau was trying to tell us her voice was “shot” like forty years ago. Um, no.

what grade did he give dylan's latest phlegmfest?

it is so infuriating how little respect critics gave her throughout even when praising the material as if she was incidental to what made those records sound great

tbc he loved Tina Turner

Bob clearly thought her voice was gone back on Nutbush City Limits in 1973. As with all things Xgau, there's at least a hint of misogyny in his praise of female artists, ogling her legs, alluding to her submissiveness to Ike, the music industry, etc. But he was indeed a big fan.

Her vocal on Herbie Hancock's 2007 cover of Joni Mitchell's "Edith & The Kingpin" is quite something: a side to her that I hadn't heard before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwDIJjYhQRo

^^A big discovery for me from the Sirius/xM playlist.

Woah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHdE5BVAUDk

Kinda surprised Prince never wrote a song for her!