Page 40 - Seniorstoday June2023

Music

Love at first sound:

One woman’s tribute to the

God of Rock ’n’ Roll

Tina Turner stood true to her legacy, “to never gave up on who she was”, writes
Radhika Vaz

I was 11 years old when I first met Tina that when I grew up I wanted to be Tina
Turner. It was 1984, I was in boarding Turner.
school in Ooty and her photograph was on
the cover of a cassette tape. At the moment
of reckoning she was wearing black leather
and red lipstick and singing a song called
‘What’s love got to do with it’. This, I
learned much later, was a song expressly
not about love but about it’s much more
fun cousin S.E.X. But at 11 I had no clue nor
did I care. I wasn’t obsessed with the song
because of the lyrics I was obsessed by the
voice that sang them.
If you have never heard a Tina Turner
song let me prepare you – her voice is like
thunder. It is raw, powerful, dangerous.
And just like her voice Tina looked like
thunder too. She was the most glamourous Tina Turner was made for women like
thing I had ever seen in my young life, myself. She was a huge success in a field
instantly displacing Zeenat Aman from the where looks matter yet she was not a
pedestal upon which I had placed her a few conventionally pretty woman – in fact she
years before. And I knew there and then wasn’t pretty at all, in fact I wonder if she

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