“Recorded in England, Private Dancer uses blazing hard-rock guitars as a platform for Turner’s mammoth power. Showing off her lion’s mane wig, runner’s legs and dominatrix high heels on the album cover, the 44-year-old Turner stunned the world with her ferocious, mature sexuality. Released at the puritanical height of the feminist anti-pornography crusade, the album daringly invoked prostitution in its title. But “What’s Love Got to Do with It” makes a feminist statement, as Turner embraces a radical freedom of sexual choice. The five-times-platinum album projects her as a hybrid superwoman, her Amazonian militance melting into bluesy yearning. She is both hard and soft, raw and smooth, a truly modern woman for all seasons.”
/ Camilla Paglia writing for Billboard magazine in 2014 /
Released on this day (29 May 1984): force-of-nature veteran soul queen Tina Turner’s triumphant all-conquering Private Dancer album. Allmusic website calls it in “one of the most amazing comebacks in the history of American popular music” and Robert Christgau concludes “Private Dancer remains the archetypal all-singles all-hits multi-producer crossover” - and who could disagree? As Turner herself noted, her age, colour and gender were all strikes against her in the youth-obsessed music industry of the 1980s (hell, they would still be issues today!). But after previous desultory solo attempts sank without a trace (like Rough (1978) and Love Explosion (1979), which wasn’t even released in the US), Private Dancer conclusively ended the down-on-her-luck diva’s hardscrabble post-Ike wilderness years playing corporate gigs for McDonalds executives, doing disco medleys in Las Vegas lounges and appearing on Hollywood Squares and The Brady Bunch Variety Hour. Considering it was cobbled together from cover versions and off-cuts (“Better Be Good to Me” was intended for Pat Benatar! “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” was originally recorded by Bucks Fizz!), its authority and cohesion is stunning. And the songs feel like Turner’s autobiographical statements, depicting a tough, independent woman seeking love on her own terms. In conclusion: Tina Turner slayed! Pic: portrait of Turner by Brian Aris, 1983.
