Tina Turner Was An Overrated Bar Singer And The Queen Of Toxic Femininity – Get Over It

It’s June, and with any luck the last of the vomit inducing crap about old Tina Turnoff finally running out of ‘eternal youth’ quack cures to blow her millions on.

If Tina Turner was the most important female recording artist of all time as the current ludicrous hyperbole of this glorified bar singer would have it, why in her own country did she only have one number one, six top ten hits and a derisory three top ten hit albums in her own country?

Moreover, why did she never score a single hit beyond the early 1990s? Her last top ten Billboard hit was in 1986, her last top twenty the year after. By 1989, ‘Steamy Windows’ could only make No. 39 and

The cold hard truth was Turner’s entire act – no matter how much historical revisionism is put on it – centered on a tired ‘woman as slut’ objectification routine, making her no different from the conveyor belt of botoxed bimbos in microskirts squeaking aural atrocities written by cynical svengalis that have polluted popular music for half a century.

She never wrote a single song, and were it not for washed up 70s easy listening act Gallagher & Lyle (‘Breakaway’ and ‘Heart On My Sleeve’) married to the technical expertise of the British Electronic Foundation (better known as the synth band Heaven 17 which split from the Human League), she would have remained an irrelevance.

Tina Turner, like Cher, enjoyed a temporary 80s comeback on the back of a consumer boom, the new wave of hyper-slick cocaine fueled marketing practices as the music industry consolidated after the late 70s free for all, and overhype by aging press hacks desperately clinging to their youth – with the connivance of seedy tabloid editors happy to give double pages to any woman with zero qualms about wardrobe malfunctioning as much as possible.

Not that it was all male: for a certain type of 80s female, Turner was an icon that you could be thick as pig shit and have the singing voice of a car exhaust, but if you have plenty of ‘attitude’ and your outfits in inverse proportion to the amount of plastic surgery you’d undergone, you could become rich and famous. Like Germaine Greer and All That never happened.

This included boasting about swapping out her blood in private clinics in the absurd Countess Bathory belief it would keep her young at the height of the AIDS epidemic. She even indulged – like the paedophile Michael Jackson – in skin lightening in order to appeal more to whitey – making her later attempts to play the black card in a final desperate grasp for 21st century relevence utterly offensive;

Once her ‘good time had by all’ persona became too ludicrous for even her most slavish fans, the hits abruptly dried up by the early 90s: whereupon she reinvented herself as a career ‘victim’ and ‘survivor’, milking to death the past history of her abusive relationship with the neanderthal Ike Turner for the benefit of a lurid voyeristic society who can never get enough dysfunctional relationship porn under a veneer of ’empathising’. Yeah, sure. The fact she only chucked Ike once clear like Sonny and Cher or Captain and Tennile the public now regarded their double act as hick caberet was airbrushed out.

Sounds snide? What the hell do you think the ultra successful Lifetime TV Channel’s target demographic is all about? Why is every crappy TV talent show contest a ‘victim’ or ‘survivor’ of something or other? Blame Turner and her ilk for turning that into the hawt sauce every microwave meal of a diva requires for their five minutes of fame and millions to this day.

Tina Turner was no ‘pioneer’ or icon – just an overrated bar singer and the queen of toxic femininity. Get over it, because sure as hell the rest of the world did long ago – after all, until she croaked, when was the last time you heard any of her songs on the radio?