Eighty-three is a full life. Even if it’s gobsmacking to know Kenneth Anger lived to 96 and Marshall Allen celebrates his 99th birthday today, longevity is a strange and often arbitrary concept. I’d question the moral character of anyone who needed Tina Turner to do any more living than she did.
“Standing in your power” is a hip phrase in therapy and healing spaces these days, and Tina embodied it fully: as a performer and pop star and screen presence, as a singer and recording artist, and of course as a woman who sustained physical and psychic damage and spent many subsequent decades figuring out not just how to Be A Survivor™ in a pre-MeToo climate but to be one on a very massive scale, often risking retraumatizing herself so the prevailing story would be her truth and not Hollywood’s spin on it. It wasn’t something she wanted to undertake, a tell-all like HBO’s Tina, but she did “the work” so she could participate in such things and emerge safe.
Her power terrifies me, frankly, just that amplitude of it, although every time I’ve had to rummage deeeeep into myself to locate a core truth or stray bit of courage, I get a sense of what she needed to do to get there.
And I think that was within her from the jump, although you can’t be certain. It’s tempting to listen to, say, “River Deep, Mountain High” and extrapolate internal fortitude. You need a commanding voice to match Phil Spector’s enormity; Ronnie Spector and Darlene Love knew this. On the other hand, we have singers like Dusty Springfield, capable of a showstopper belt but quite meek and guarded offstage. Personalities are complex, but logical fallacies are easy.
It’s also easy to say that her epochal comeback in her forties is “proof” of something about her rather than just a combination of luck, her drive, a manager with an ear for a song no one else knew what to do with, a supportive label, the chart convergence of rock and R&B via Thriller, and a visual identity that didn’t have to get ready for MTV because it had stayed ready. Nothing is random, and everything is. But however she got there, she deserved every column inch, every penny.
There are people whose passing makes me go “aw man” and then those whose passing takes my breath away: Lou’s did, Bowie’s did, George Michael, Prince, David Berman, Aretha Franklin, Pauline Oliveros, Ornette Coleman. Big celebrities and more niche figures, doesn’t matter. The sudden absence of the corporeal form, and the looming eternal anima of their name and all the luminance they’ve brought to the world. Fame is an insane, irrational, harmful thing, but our stars do light our lives. It’s an utter miracle when anyone in that business stays sane. It’s understandable when they don’t! Tina, bless her, made her inner peace a top priority, inspiring millions of us to keep seeking the love we need from ourselves (in healthy proportion to the entertainment value we demand from our celebrities).
Good night Tina, and thank you.
