Tina Turner’s Cosmic Life
The late singer stretched human expression to its fraying limits—and then her story became a folktale.
You can pick virtually any Tina Turner hit to tidily emblematize her career—a career filled with rivers deep and mountains high, a career of rolling on churning waters, a career that was simply, well, you know. But today’s news of her death at age 83 also brings to mind a song that wasn’t itself as big of a hit: a squelchy artifact of 1980s production techniques called “I Might Have Been Queen.”
At the time Turner released the song, in 1984, she did not feel like a queen. She had been struggling to secure success as a solo artist after the dissolution of her abusive marriage and creative partnership with Ike Turner. She did not know that the album she was working on, Private Dancer, would help launch her into eternal legend. But her Buddhist faith gave her comfort, as did the advice of a psychic who told her she’d been a pharaoh in a past life. So the songwriters Jeannette Obstoj, Rupert Hine, and Jamie West-Oram wrote her an anthem about reincarnation: “I look down and I’m there in history,” went one line that Turner delivered in her majestically strange sing-growl. “I’m a soul survivor.”
Turner’s life had a cosmic dimension to it, spanning disparate eras and places, and suggesting the primordial struggle for safety out of chaos. She was born in 1939 on a Tennessee sharecropping farm, and had early memories of picking cotton. She would endure one of the most notorious marriages and artistic arrangements in history. But she spent nearly the last three decades of her life in Switzerland, calmly ensconced away from both the turbulence and the acclaim she’d experienced in America. And of course, she was responsible for some of the biggest songs of all time—big in terms of popularity but also in emotional scale, owing to a voice that stretched human expression to its fraying limits.
Working with the pioneering bandleader Ike starting in the late ’50s, Turner used her voice as a bridge to the future. In the hit “A Fool in Love,” she wailed in a manner that was part gospel and partly a premonition of heavy metal, scraping rudely against a politely shuffling arrangement. Ike tried to dominate her both emotionally and musically, but her assertions of autonomy produced some of the pair’s most important work. Against Ike’s wishes, she recorded Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary,” and without Ike’s direct involvement, she collaborated with Phil Spector to create “River Deep—Mountain High.” On both of those songs, the combination of trancelike rhythms and frenzied vocals feels ritualistic and ravelike, and utterly specific to the singer herself.
Ike never denied Tina’s highly publicized claims that he’d abused her, only how much and how badly. But in the great 2021 documentary Tina, Turner made clear that the media’s interest in portraying her as a victim exasperated her. This perhaps explains why, in the ’80s and ’90s, she found solo success with songs that had a kind of hard-won chillness to them. “What’s Love Got to Do With It” and “The Best” are, of course, enormously passionate songs, but they steamroll you gently, dignifiedly, making them apt for all sorts of commercial environments. Around this time, Turner’s lion-mane hair and imperious stage presence lent her the air of a superhero, a perception she embraced with her memorable turn in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
She could have kept going, running victory-lap tours and lending her voice to big-tent projects like she did with her 1995 James Bond theme. But she announced her retirement in 2000 and mostly stuck to it—save one last tour in 2008 and 2009. Her legacy only continued to grow while she watched from her château in Switzerland, where she lived with her husband, Erwin Bach, a former music executive. In pop music, her spirit—a combination of exertion, excellence, vulnerability, and spectacle—has been carried forward by apostles such as Beyoncé. In culture more broadly, her story has become a kind of folktale, told and retold in books and TV shows and on Broadway. By the end of her life, that queen title she dreamed about may have become an understatement. If anyone is a rock god, it’s Tina Turner.
