Long out of the limelight, Tina Turner was still revered as a pop goddess, like a kind of phoenix who rose several times from the ashes. She will also be remembered as a very brave woman, an avant la lettre feminist who knew how to get out of the misery of machismo and mistreatment. Watching the documentary film produces chills. She was a stage animal who fascinated by her voice, charisma and her body.
But at the same time she was a caged animal that suffered unspeakably until she hit an abyssal bottom from which she was pulled out by a music, pop, in which at first she did not believe. And, as in fairy tales, she not only knew how to resurface, but also reached the glory of the stadiums and the devotion of her followers, including Prince Charming, a European gentleman in the antipodes of her first husband.
Tina Turner has been an absolute myth of music, beyond her personal vicissitudes. Her song River deep, mountain high with Phil Spector is one of the pinnacles of soul, in the same way that her hits from the eighties are emblematic of pop.
Although perhaps it’s fairer to remember her as a whirlwind of soul and rock, galvanizing the masses with her hips, with an animal magnetism headed by a prodigious voice that placed her among the most appreciated entertainers in pop history. She has succumbed to a long illness, but we will always remember her exultant, dominating the stage and not as the slave of a savage, but as an empowered woman who put the whole world to eat at her feet, long after what the canons of youth and beauty impose.
