Tina turner

Tuesday

David Honigmann

The misery of working with Chuck Berry

In Ian Leslie’s John & Paul, the creative relationship between the titular Beatles is treated as a platonic love story. Matt Thorne widens the paradigm with seven more pairings, variously rivalrous, amorous, respectful, disrespectful and occasionally frankly tenuous. The 11 American and three British musicians here have careers that collectively cover seven decades of popular music. There are three dynamics at play. First, there are the Thucydides tensions, where a waning power tangles with a rising one. Frank Sinatra invites Elvis Presley to join him on a television show; Keith Richards throws a filmed concert with Chuck Berry. (Richards, for once, is the younger partner.) The older player is not always generous.

Wednesday

Oliver Wiseman

The Supreme Court is under fire — again

Some weeks it feels like the line between politics and the law has all but vanished. From Hunter Biden’s plea deal and Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal woes to the brouhaha surrounding gifts accepted by Supreme Court justices and John Durham’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee to defend his report on the FBI and Russiagate, this is one such week.  For more on the Hunter story, check out my colleague Ben Domenech’s latest. Meanwhile, a fresh row about the Supreme Court bubbled up in an unusual way overnight.

tina turner
Cockburn

Is Kamala Harris the new Tina Turner?

Kamala Harris wants you to know how much she loves Tina Turner. She loves her so much that she has wonderfully unique and joyous memories of listening to the Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll’s most famous hits growing up. “When I was a child, my mother would play “Proud Mary” on repeat as I danced around our living room, singing along into my toy microphone at the top of my lungs,” Harris wrote. Harris revealed this moment of rare vulnerability in a tribute to Turner published in Rolling Stones Tuesday. And reading Kamala’s tribute, Cockburn can’t help but think she considers herself the heir to Turner’s legacy. The constant sexism and racism that Turner overcame in the music industry must have inspired a young Harris’s calls for “Fweedom.

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Tina Turner was greater than a rock star

Even rock and roll can have produced few stranger paths than the one that led a then physically unprepossessing, raspy-voiced African-American named Anna Mae Bullock from her early days as a devoutly Baptist sharecropper’s daughter in Depression-era Tennessee, to her final years as a practicing Buddhist living in a whitewashed mansion overlooking the dove-blue haze of Lake Geneva. That was the life trajectory of the artist known to the world as Tina Turner, who died Wednesday at the age of eighty-three.

tina turner

Thursday

Graeme Thomson

A redemption song, conventionally sung: Sky’s Tina reviewed

From our UK edition

It has never been easy for women in the music industry. Once upon a time the evidence was largely anecdotal. Now it’s being recorded for posterity, frame by frame. Recent documentaries about Britney Spears and Demi Lovato exposed the trauma inflicted on post-millennial pop stars. Two new portraits of Anna Mae Bullock and Marianne Elliott-Said, better known as Tina Turner and Poly Styrene from punk group X-Ray Spex, ponder the price paid by their forebears. Turner’s story feels archetypal, a tale extracted from deep within the DNA of showbusiness. An abandoned child — ‘my mother didn’t like me’ — from a poor Tennessee background, the opportunity to fulfil her gifts came with the classic caveat: subjugation by an older, controlling man.