There are plenty of artists whose reputations outshine their musical output. You know, the artists who are a household name but the common man struggles to name more than like three songs of theirs. I don't know if Tina Turner is one of those artists. Maybe. When she passed away in 2023, the RC album of hers we covered was basically the only body of work of hers that I was familiar with. I'm sure there are a few other hits that I would recognize if I heard them, but I can't rattle off the best of Tina Turner, let alone name any of her albums beyond Private Dancer.
The question was whether this is my fault for being ignorant, or it really is a matter of Tina Turner just having a showstopping star quality and the voice to fill stadiums but not necessarily a critically acclaimed discography. There's nothing wrong with that if it's the latter. I really enjoyed Private Dancer and I'm glad I was able to get to know one of her albums when she was alive. But it was interesting choosing a second album to explore for this other blog column, because there's not really an agreed-upon second-best. So I just chose Acid Queen because, yes, I've seen Tommy, and yes, Tina Turner is fucking great in that film.
What's interesting about Acid Queen is that the entire first half is comprised of cover songs. Two from the Who and the Stones each, plus a Led Zeppelin cut. Obviously she does a great job doing these songs, all five of whose original versions I was intimately familiar with before this week. But it's more interesting because then the focus turns from "how good are Tina's songs" to "how good does Tina perform on other people's songs," which maybe misses the point of the outsized presence of Tina Turner. And it also feels more male-centric than it needed to be. Produced by men, frontloaded with covers of songs by men, the first non-cover a song with her abusive soon-to-be ex-husband... I mean, I guess the overarching point is that she was trying to reach a certain audience, the audience of the genre that she namechecks in the album's final (and the album's fourth Ike-penned) song, "Rockin' and Rollin'." And in the mid-1970s, she was trailblazing for Black women rockers, and you can't really blame her or anyone for taking the path that involved cover songs like these.
And this was probably the first time I made an effort to read through what the deal is with Ike and Tina's relationship, and the domestic violence that occurred throughout. I feel like it sounds like Ike was a piece of shit and an abuser, but it also doesn't seem like it was as fantastically horrific as the tabloids would want you to believe. Run-of-the-mill domestic violence is still awful and I condemn it in every instance. I'm just saying that I am even familiar with the DV in this particular context because it was two celebrities. And more than that, two celebrities that were married and built a body of work together. Does all of this make me uncomfortable listening to ""Baby, Get It On"? A little bit! But not enough that I'm, like, shocked. This is just because I am a social worker and I am numb on this subject. The only time I feel any emotions at all are when I listen to music and think about the artists who were victims or perpetrators.
I guess I'm part of the problem, if my takeaway from listening to this album is "let's talk about some dudes." If I were to focus on Tina Turner's presence on this Tina Turner album, I would say that her rep is well earned. She is out of this world. Her voice is electric. The classic rock classic songs she's singing here are all taken up a couple notches in drama just based on the way she uses her weapon of a voice to bludgeon them into her submission. I'm surprised Robert Plant didn't go back to construction work after hearing Turner's version of "Whole Lotta Love." And even though Ike Turner wrote the back half of the album, Tina Turner makes these songs all her own too. "Bootsey Whitelaw" is so fucking badass, and I don't care who wrote it. We saw this with "Steel Claw" on Private Dancer—every song written by anyone is taken up like seven notches just because this is Tina Turner we're talking about.
I don't think that Tina Turner had to break down every single barrier on earth. The fact that her voice and presence was powerful enough to be spoken about in the same breath (and earlier on in that breath, sometimes) as your Jaggers and Plants was enough. It's okay that she was operating still under the old system in another way, i.e. that she wasn't writing her own songs. One thing at a time. Listening to Acid Queen is, in my opinion, enough to say that Tina Turner's reputation does not overshadow her body of work. The body of work is impressive too.
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