Yleisradio’s music editor Pekka Laine says that Tina Turner has been relevant both with her music and her story of survival.
Yleisradio’s long-term music editor Pekka Laine elevates Tina Turner, who died on Wednesday at the age of 83, to the ranks of icons Michael Jackson’s and Elvis Presley alongside.
– He had his own voice as an interpreter. When he opens his mouth, he knows within a second who is singing there. Tina Turner is one that imitators imitate and there are versions of everything. An almost caricature-like, iconic character that lives its own life. It’s the highest level of pop stardom, that you detach from reality into your own sphere, says Laine.
According to Laine, Turner was significant in two different ways.
– As an artist, when you look at the music she has made and her personal story: a great survivor and a strong woman, an iconic figure.
According to Laine, most of Turner’s contemporaries remained the stars of their own generation in the 1960s and 70s, but Turner had a new, massive rise in the 1980s, which puts him in a class of his own.
Laine says that Turner served as an inspiration to many. Surviving an abusive relationship, and coming out of it even stronger, brought Turner to a much wider audience.
– People who didn’t necessarily know his music even that well became interested in him.
In the 1980s, Turner managed to acquire a completely new audience, which was many times the size of the previous one.
– He was an iron performer already in the 60s at the time of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue. Kinda like James Brown. Spearheads of black music. The kind that white bands like The Rolling Stones looked up to. On top of that, as a pop megastar in the 80s, I can’t think of a point of comparison for him, says Laine.
As The Rolling Stones button, it should be mentioned that the British The Daily Mail in an interview in 2017, Turner said that he had taught the band’s singer Mick Jagger’s to dance in the 60s.
Laine likes Tina Turner and her then-husband Ike Turner’s 1966’s River Deep Mountain High as a sort of rock culmination.
– Nothing similar had been heard before. The vitality and raw, overwhelming energy of African-American music flowed very strongly in him. Gospel and blues music that comes straight from the source, so to speak. These mickjaggers were a bit of a tomboy by comparison. Tina was the “real thing”, says Laine.