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Two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Tina Turner died Wednesday at the age of 83, leaving behind a tremendous musical legacy. She is hailed as the godmother of rock & roll, with more than 100 million albums sold, eight Grammys and an incalculable impact on pop music. Her vibrant live shows laid the foundation for generations of leading women to follow. The path of every pop singer’s fevered stage dance routine leads back to her.
And while there’s so much to celebrate about her legacy, others are remembering how some in pop culture have ruthlessly toned down her legacy, making it a survivor of Ike Turner’s abuse. Their dysfunctional relationship was portrayed in 1993’s What’s Love Got to Do With It, which documented Ike’s abuse throughout their 16-year marriage. Angela Bassett and Lawrence Fishburne gave rousing, memorable performances as Tina and Ike Turner, but some drew the wrong conclusions.
Ike Turner’s music career never recovered, but far too many rappers made him a beacon of dominant idolatry. Fishburne’s portrayal of Ike prepared him to be called a representative of violence, even though his violence was directed at a black woman. But given hip-hop’s inability to face multiple abuse allegations with Tory Lanez, Chris Brown, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, or any of the community’s other beloved festival headliners, one wonders if rapper bars like Quavo’s “Ike Turner “With the spit left hand”, although he hurt a black woman or because of it.
The Ike Turner lines seem endless: “Before I beat yourself up like Ike” Ye rhymed with “Diamonds Are Forever”. The Notorious BIG rhymed “Beatin’ motherfuckers like Ike beat Tina” with “Machine Gun Funk”. Lloyd Banks spat “We fight, wake up and fuck like Ike and Tina Turner” on I’m So Fly. Fabolous said on Got That Work, “She calls me Ike Turner because I hit her in the car.” And while he was referring to sex, it can be argued that male obsession with phallicism as violence conflates double meaning.
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One of the most outrageous Ike Turner bars is Jay-Z saying “Eat the cake Anna Mae” in “Drunk in Love.” The line refers to a What’s Love scene in which Ike Turner forces Tina, then known by her first name as Anna Mae Bullock, to eat a piece of cake at a diner. The statement was not just a deep incision and was not uttered by a ruthless twenty-year-old looking for shock effects. “Drunk in Love” is a canonical song by two of the music world’s greatest artists who are forever tainted. Beyoncé praised Tina Turner as an idol, but still allowed that line in the song. You’d think the line was written during an album cycle before Beyoncé’s Lemonade and Jay-Z’s 4:44, two LPs that reflect frayed love. Beyoncé struggles with the frustration of an unsatisfactory marriage on Lemonade, and at 4:44 Jay-Z looks in the mirror, seeking answers for his inability to be a good husband.
On the track “4:44,” Jay-Z rhymes, “It took a while for my child to be born, see through a woman’s eyes.” It’s not until he’s tasked with raising a girl that he realizes the humanity of a Woman. This dehumanizing mindset is all too common in a society that doesn’t treat women as a whole, and it shows why men find it too easy to find humor in domestic violence and too hard to honor survivors. At best, we romanticize abuse because we don’t know any better, and at worst, it’s because it’s our own fault. Violence permeates every cog in Western society, and it’s no surprise that some people believe violence has a place in love.
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“What’s Love Got to Do With It” revolves around an all too understandable question: “Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?” It is a call to so many love seekers who, in their quest for love, that are too corrupt or broken to offer or receive, are shaken. But after seeing the decades of torment Tina endured at the hands of the music world that profoundly shaped her, one wonders if that dilemma was just a statement of romantic love or a lament about how society had her heart broken once again by deifying her abuser.
Unfortunately, the factors that cause domestic violence and downplay domestic violence didn’t stop at her 83rd year. And they may not end for the next 83 years. There is no mercy amid capitalism, machismo, patriarchy, and every other violent force that produces dysfunctional men like Ike Turner. There can only be peace of mind in finding your way through everything, and Tina seemed to have found it in her later years. She left the US and moved to Switzerland in 1995. It wasn’t until 2019 that she told CBS’ Gayle King that that’s where she found happiness in her life. Yet, as Rob Sheffield brilliantly remarked, her fiery voice carried “the whole history of American music within it”. But the root of that fire is the black woman’s experience. In the fervor of her stage presence lay the abuse, abuse, exploitation, and ridicule she sought to exorcise through her craft. Her soaring voice resounded above everything. But it didn’t have to be.