Impressions from TINA (HBO)

Just finished the Tina Turner documentary on HBO and wow, that was intense. It's beautifully done and the performances are absolute dynamite. It's a thrill to hear her speak, so deliberately and vividly. My respect for her has certainly skyrocketed.

The documentary took things from the start of her time with Ike first, through her time leaving him,  before rewinding to her time as a kid about 50 miles east of Memphis, TN in Nutbush, TN. (There's an exhibit about her at a rest stop on I-40 alongside Sleepy John Estes' cabin.)  She talks about Ike as an idol of hers and joins him on tour while she's still in school and it's understandable why: Ike was a musical genius who played a key role in inventing the rock & roll and funk genres as a producer and multi-instrumentalist. I got a lot out of what Katori Hall had to say. Hall is a playwright (including of the Tina musical) and screenwriter, but, in the film, who could provide perspective as a black, female Memphian. Hall points out that the violence and absence of love in Tina's life started well before she met Ike; her mother walked out on her family when she was a child and only reappeared in her life when she became famous and rich in the 1980s. She was also a survivor of domestic violence, so, like many people of color was faced with an impossible choice. Tina does say that she was not a loving mother to her even while she was still in the family. Tina, for her part, explains that she became ready to leave Ike in part because she had learned about Buddhist practices.

Tina keeps having to make lesser-of-two-evils choices, sometimes with dramatically ironic results: leaving Ike, she's penniless and has to work to pay the bills and pay off debts so she can't slow down and figure out her own style of music right away; her goal of being the biggest female rock & roll singer in the world leaves her having to keep doing interviews, which keeps her talking about her past and keeps her thinking about that; she wants to sing rock & roll but she finds that she keeps being nudged into pop and R&B; she writes a book so that she can tell her full story once and for all and then can stop but it just makes her more popular and brings on more questions about the past; she gains fame under the assumed name Tina given to her by her abusive ex-husband but it's the tool that allows her to start her solo career with some notoriety (she was born Anna Mae Bullock) and she then seizes it as her own; and her farewell to her American fans and act of letting go of her musical career is via the Tina musical, and where she's again confronted with a singer/actor playing Ike and one playing herself, flanking her on stage. There are parallels with slavery, being assigned a new name and being stuck with it even after slavery ended. She describes her relationship with Ike by saying, "He wanted to own me,” further paralleling slavery.

Most ironically of all, her bravery, openness, and honesty in leaving Ike and then telling her story changes the world and inspires literally millions people in abusive situations everywhere but she can't feel the service in that because she's reliving the trauma, including in nightmares she still has.

The documentary plays a harrowing tape from her interviews with co-author of her autobiography I, Tina, Kurt Loder. (By the way, if any of my generation X friends want to feel old, Kurt Loder is now looking grandfatherly.)  The cassette (and you hear the hum of the medium) has her talking super honestly about how she felt unlovable her whole life, as a kid picking cotton in the fields, how her parents didn't express love to her even before her mother left, in the violence between her parents, with Ike, and so forth. At the height of her success in the 1980s, she is largely alone save for her manager and, even as an international sex symbol, entirely romantically alone. It's affecting and open and as honest as she could be but in her cry of hurt on that tape, she also starts to see the clarity that will allow her to move forward. She recognizes that she is lovable and she can overcome those feelings within her.

"I'm a girl from the cotton field who pulled herself above what was not taught to me," she says in the documentary. "I had an abusive life," she continues, both in the trailer. It seems clear that she's making a connection between the cotton fields and the later abuse. It seems inevitable that someone forced to work for nothing as a child in the cotton fields for the enrichment of others more powerful than them would then think that that were a natural role for her to play later on, with Ike. Even later, she is forced to leave the US and record in London to pursue the sound she wants as opposed to being put in the R&B box. Her retirement is spent in Switzerland, about as far from the Tennessee Delta as one can get. She marries a European white man and is managed by a Brit. “Look what I have done in this lifetime, with this body,” she sums it up, implying that her body that was once used for exploitation had later become her own.

Her story also reminded me of the traumas other black musicians faced. B.B. King's mother and then grandmother died and then he was abused by his father before running away from home to live on his own as a child. He later acknowledged that as an adult he sought the sexual love of so many women because he couldn't get enough love to fill that hole from his childhood of missing his mother. James Brown's mother also left, leaving him to be raised by his aunt. Aretha Franklin's mother, also facing a lose-lose choice, left his abusive father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, and her kids in the process. It's especially interesting to see the parallels of her story with Aretha's, especially so soon after seeing Genius: Aretha, a flawed but enjoyed limited series.

At the time when these musicians were born, less than 100 years out from slavery and with other forms of servitude still in practice, it's no shock that families oppressed and faced with the omnipresent threat of white violence have trouble loving and receiving love. White power was demonstrated via the threat of violence and economic exploitation and treating black people as inferior and we see Ike as well as Brown and Franklin's first husband, who was famously abusive as well, mimicking those patterns in an attempt to gain the power the way they saw it wielded. The inter-generational effect is a phenomenon studied and explained by Dr. Joy DeGruy in her book Post Traumatic Slave Disorder, wherein she talks about the both the nature and nurture effects of the trauma of slavery, passed down well past its end:

 

This is not to say that Brown and Ike Turner didn't have any agency in the situations; they were free to make choices. But to explain Tina's story entirely as a series of individual bad actors she happened to encounter for the first thirty-something years of her life pushes away the role of Jim Crow systems had on people.

 

As with some music documentaries, the music itself is shown in high-energy, tight performances with Tina's wild, hypnotic dancing. But the growth of the music itself (Ike goes from rhythm & blues and early rock & roll to soul to funk in two-plus decades with Tina as the star) is talked about but on a fairly surface level. It's such an affecting and personal story that on one level that's understandable but on another level, the documentary does what it accuses the '80s gossip press of doing, not asking Tina enough about the music in its new interviews with her.

A personal anecdote: When I was a kid, I didn't even know about Ike & Tina, just heard her hits on the radio 24/7. I've never seen the 1993 feature film. When I first heard Ike with Tina, I was floored by the music. My second music industry job (not counting an internship) was with Tuff City Records and I was assigned at one point to fact-check the liner notes to the reissue of an Ike and Tina recording. I called him repeatedly and sometimes he would answer and say he was recording and sometimes the machine would get it. Finally, I reached him at a good time and asked him if indeed the  tracks had been recorded in the cities we had listed while on off days from tour and he said something to the effect of: "You think I remember that shit?!" I replied with something like: "OK. Thanks for your time."