Tina Turner showed us that black women could rock

nypost.com:

Stevie Nicks) to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice in 2021.Even if you didn’t know one song by the woman born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tenn., on Nov.

26, 1939 — who died at 83 on Wednesday, after living longer than many, including me, would have ever anticipated given all of her trials and tribulations — you knew that she was the epitome of endurance, resilience and unbreakable badassness.But Turner’s story — immortalized by an Oscar-nominated performance from Angela Bassett that had folks feeling like she was long overdue when she lost out to Jamie Lee Curtis for Best Supporting Actress earlier this year — shouldn’t overshadow her impact and importance as an artist.She was the first black woman who I — and many others — saw rock.

No doubt, she was much more rock than R&B back when those two worlds did not cross the color lines.In fact, my earliest memory of Tina Turner is when she was in “Tommy.” I may not have been old enough to actually see that movie when it came out, but somehow I still found out about this black queen who was playing the Acid Queen alongside all of these white men who didn’t look anything like me.Tina was rocking way before Jimi, before Prince.

When her “Private Dancer” comeback album came out in 1984 — the same year that Prince’s “Purple Rain” changed my world — she was like a brand new artist to me and many others at 45.She, as much as Prince, was part of a whole new revolution to me and many other black kids to show that we could rock too.But it was the release of her 1985 autobiography “I, Tina” and the subsequent film it inspired, 1993’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” that really made me go down the rabbit hole to discover classics like her transcendent, transformative.