Fever by Tim Riley

ballad—ominous, threatening, and finally liberating—was about women’s struggle for self-respect in a man’s world, even through something you love as much as music.
    The irony, of course, is that listening to Tina sing this song, everything she’s gone through notwithstanding, you come away knowing that for her, love has everything to do with her talent and success: love of the music, love of performing, and love of where the music can ultimately take a performer and her audience.
    With “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” and the revelations in her 1985 autobiography, I, Tina, Turner stepped forward to embody the ultimate liberated woman who refused to be kept down by her man or held back by having no man. Here was a new kind of gender pose: a singer who refused to be defined by her sex, genre, or race. In her mid-forties, Turner recaptured a huge female audience without sacrificing any of her masculine aggression—or losing male fans who admired her ferocity, humor, and sex appeal. Tina sang for a vast, until-then-silent majority of women who had endured domestic abuse, struggled for decency, and fought for not only professional and personal parity, but a new self-respect that suffrage and bra burning only hinted at.
    On the basis of her recording breakthrough, Tina was suddenly cast opposite Mel Gibson in a sequel to an action franchise ( Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985). (Who would be the male analog to Tina Turner in the 1980s—Sly Stallone’s Rambo?) And alongside Mick Jagger at the close of Live Aid that summer (singing “Honky Tonk Woman”), Turner made it clear who had shown this white dandy all his moves. Who else could intimidate Jagger so sexually in front of 1.5 billion viewers worldwide—at his own invitation?
    As she seized her moment, and strung out her comeback into a dizzying series of tours well into the 1990s, Tina Turner became one of the biggest gender conundrums of our time: a woman with the kind of strength men can only envy. In her realm as queen of pop, subsuming Debbie and Madonna and Courtney and Alanis and Britney and Celine with her vast experience, imperious sexuality, and interest-bearing industry dues, Tina Turner reigns as a pillar of female success in a man’s world who makes Germaine Greer look like Doris Day.

CHAPTER 4
    I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself
    â€œWhat’s Love Got to Do with It” has a lot of history in its grit, a hard-won resilience that testifies to all the pop experience it builds upon. You can even hear “Be My Baby” in Turner’s record, not just in its sonic scope but in the way it sweeps over past triumphs and redirects its feminist passion. “Be My Baby” can still send a tingle down your spine, and it’s still a key teenage sentiment about a young woman’s desire for control. It puts Ronnie Spector in a class with Tina Turner; there’s almost nothing racial about this sound—it’s all about the poetry and possibilities of gender talk.
    But with Veronica Bennett Spector being a gorgeous young half-breed (her mother was black and Cherokee, her father white), and Phil Spector being a balding Jewish music nerd, race has become part of “Be My Baby” and its legacy. In 1963, these outsider credentials must have sent powerful signals to listeners in the throes of the civil rights movement as well as to a pop industry anxious to bare its liberal stripes. If Elvis could turn a Southern railroad junction like Memphis into rock ’n’ roll’s Mecca, and minorities could seize the levers of power in the pop centers of New York and Los Angeles, the regional music circuits—especially Detroit, the north’s oasis of jobs—couldn’t be far behind. Poring over pop history, it’s hard to separate how the civil rights movement helped sell Motown records from the way Motown records fueled the high spirits of civil rights