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The Comeback
Author: Raine    Date: 05/25/2023 13:04:48

We lost a musical Icon yesterday. Tina Turner was so much more than that. She was a legend. She was an inspiration to women everywhere.

She proved to the men that dominated, and largely still do, her industry that being over 40 and female didn't mean it was the end of the road. There are countless tributes out there about her. But for me, there was something she did that was amazing.

She left an abusive partner. She left with nothing and came back to herself, starting over. That isn't easy today and it was even harder for a woman to do so in the 70's. Joy Reid wrote this yesterday and it really puts her iconoclasty in perspective.
In the 2021 documentary “Tina,” we learned even more: about the pain of abandonment she suffered as a child, and the seemingly unsurvivable abuse not just from Ike, but from a music industry that found her, at various times, to be too Black, too white, too rock 'n' roll, too sexy for her age, and too ambitious for a woman. And we learned of Tina the mom, who struggled to balance the responsibilities of being a working, traveling musician and nurturing children when so few had bothered to emotionally nourish her.

Yet this is the diva who taught Mick Jagger how to move; David Bowie how to do rhythm and blues, and the industry how to respect an artist who could throw on a miniskirt in her 50s and 60s, sing her heart out or act her behind off, and be whoever the hell she wanted to be, unapologetically.

For all of those reasons, Tina shone. She showed Black women — really, all women — what we can be when we stop being afraid. And my mom was right. She was pretty damn cool.
She helped insecure teens like me realize we could be beautiful, bold, and loud. She paved the way for so many women in this world and there will never be anyone like her again, she didn't just open the doors, she paved the way.



The connection you see in two of my musical heroes (no pun intended) was very real.
After her and Ike's public separation in 1976, she had been dropped by her label, Capitol Records, and took a brief hiatus from music. In 2004, she revealed in a conversation with UK outlet Female First that she was able to get back on her feet because of the help fellow musician Bowie offered.

"In 1983 David Bowie did something very special and significant for me," Turner said. "We were on the same label, but the decision had been taken not to re-sign me. David, however, had just had his contract renewed by Capitol, who wanted to take him out to dinner that night in New York to celebrate. 'I'm sorry,' he told them, 'but I'm going to the Ritz to see my favorite singer perform.' And that was me."

It was only after Bowie's refusal that the record label "bigwig tagged along" to see Turner perform — and the rest was history.


Thank god we will always have her music.

&

Raine
 

7 comments (Latest Comment: 05/25/2023 19:03:26 by BobR)
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