LUIS ALEMANY
Madrid
Updated Wednesday,24May2023-23:17
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- Obituary Tina Turner Dies at 83
- Opinion Tina Turner: something wild
- Reactions Everyone says goodbye to Tina Turner
On November 27, 1967, the second issue of Rolling Stone magazine hit newsstands with a portrait of Tina Turner on the cover: a black-and-white photo taken during a performance in which the most surprising, at first glance, was that the singer, about to turn 28 that same week and photographed in foreshortening, It was already unmistakable. The woman on that cover could only be Tina Turner with her ecstatic mouth look, her short dress and her muscles in tension.
That image of the woman who was born with the name of Anna Mae Bullock has accompanied us for the next 56 years with the same attributes, as if some attic kept for years a canvas with her aged image. Turner was the defiant, free, obvious and joyfully sexualized woman, but also partly ironic and good-humored. The second time Rolling Stone photographed Tina Turner on its cover, in 1969, the singer posed with a gesture that could be that of a young aunt playing tiger with her nephews or that of a lover who has taken the initiative in courtship. Tina Turner was the only woman in the world who could give such an ambiguous and irresistible image.
There is something else that is outstanding in those covers of Rolling Stone and that today can go unnoticed: that woman was black. For reference: Vogue didn't bring a black woman to its cover until 1974. In 1967, Aretha Franklin still looked like an insecure teenager in photographs dressed in a white men's shirt and the Ronettes appeared as debutants at a spring ball. It is true that Diana Ross poked her head in 1967 as a modern and aestheticized version of Josephine Baker, but it was far from giving her image the same meaning of challenge that Turner had, And the cinema? The Blaxplotaition genre did not receive that name until 1972 and, in its beginnings, left some of the most testosteronic films in the history of cinema. Only in 1972, Pam Grier got a co-starring role in Hitman, albeit playing a pornographic film actress, and began to compose an image comparable to that of Tina Turner.
"Everything I know about being a faggot I learned from Tina Turner. More specifically, I learned it from Ike and Tina Turner's version of the song Proud Mary, from their kitschy interpretation that explained to me how to be a Mary," wrote Madison Moore, a Yale professor of fashion studies, to explain the impact of her image on a generation that in 1969 had not even been born. Her theory in the essay Tina Theory: Notes on Fierceness is easy to explain: the singer was a total image of rebellion, capable of appealing to all those who felt in conflict with the dominant culture: gays, blacks, women ... Tina Turner, according to Moore, had the quality of fierceness: she was theatrical and at the same time spontaneous, she was hedonistic and rebellious. Tina Turner was the opposite of the good black girl, docile and conformist, who went to Mass, but she also did not resemble the asexual militants who accompanied Malcolm X. Tina was like Muhammad Ali, rebellious and irresistible.
Tina Turner dies: Her five best songsTHE WORLD
The singer articulated that message not only with her body language; she also did it through fashion: glitter miniskirts, lingerie dresses, crochet bikinis, wigs, boots, creations by Azzedine Alaïa... Alaïa, Tunisian designer and discoverer of Naomi Campbell, is considered the best partner that Tina Turner had in the construction of her image. Together they took the theme of the torn diva and gave it the texture of gold cloths and the volume of a Greek caryatid. Her image was worth both to play a dystopian diva in Mad Max and to be photographed with Madonna and Courtney Love on another Rolling Stone cover. Beyoncé Knowles would be unimaginable without Tina Turner.
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