And the dancing? The showmanship? Her unbelievably beautiful long legs? The image of her drenched in sweat, strutting, and commanding the stage-it’s similar to Freddie Mercury flamboyantly directing the crowd at Live Aid 1985, the audience latching onto every phrase. She toured with the Stones and sold out arenas.
#YOUTUBE FEFE DOBSON EVERYTHING HOW TO#
Tina is the woman who taught Mick Jagger how to dance. Tina was the first black artist and the first female artist to be given a Rolling Stone cover. In that sense, she’s lived the life of a rockstar.Īn icon is a trendsetter. Tina, notably, lived a life that required persistence, strength, and the ability to reimagine what she could be in the music industry. A career in music is filled with hardships. The lifestyle can over-romanticize sex and drugs. Rock ’n’ roll is controversial, bad ass, and tough-perseverance is required. Rock is a direct offshoot of soul and blues. “Rather than accept something for its value … America mixes race in it,” he added. In a 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, journalist Ben Fong-Torres quotes Ike Turner as saying the song didn’t get airplay because the soul stations found it too pop and the white stations found it too R&B. Not allowing a song like “River Deep, Mountain High” to exist on American radio is exactly what pigeonholed Tina as an R&B or soul artist. programmers stunted the growth of both Ike and Tina. The inability to properly categorize her dates back to her early career with Ike Turner, when they made music based in soul and blues. Perhaps I was unaware because she’s never gotten her proper due in that regard. I was blown away at her ability to not only recreate her image, but also at the fact that she considered herself the Queen of Rock. I felt like everything I knew clearly wasn’t enough. Did she really reinvent herself in her late 40s? Was she really in her 80s now? There was no way in hell. Sure, the archival footage of Tina playing packed stadiums backed by a young band in form-fitting karate suits was entertaining, but what was more telling was my necessity to grab my phone every few minutes, fact-checking. It details her career, life, hardships, and complex relationships. HBO’s new documentary Tina puts Turner’s life story into perspective. I underestimated Tina’s age-I wrote her off as being in her late 30s. I knew about her turbulent marriage and musical relationship with Ike Turner, which produced hits like “Proud Mary” and “River Deep, Mountain High,” but that didn’t seem like very long ago. Back then, I thought Tina Turner was simply a woman of the ’80s. From the synthetic harmonica solo to the flute line in the opening intro, I had to listen and dissect every part of “What’s Love Got to Do With It” to the point where, if I hear the song today, it brings back an trace of nausea. The class was designed to build the necessary vocabulary to talk about music critically. I vaguely remember listening to Tina Turner’s “Disco Inferno” as a child, but she truly came into my life as a college freshman, as I sat in an old building, middle row, in an uncomfortable plastic chair confining me to the hour and a half of critical listening. But beware of the false narratives that can hide the icons. Iconic songs should never be missed, nor should the icons who drove them into our musical memory.
When records like Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” return to prominence, it puts things in perspective. I was born in 1995, which wasn’t that long ago, but in a world of TikTok and instant stardom, sometimes time and our perception of it seem drastically different. This week’s episode of Black Girl Song Book discusses the struggles and triumphs of singers like Corinne Bailey Rae, Fefe Dobson, and Melanie Fiona, who make music not typically expected of Black women.
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