55th place: Tina Turner
The 200 best singers of all time: Tina Turner. Raw, passionate and wild: Tina Turner is the queen of rock & roll for a reason.
As the frontwoman of the Ike & Tina Turner Revue, she bridged the divide between R&B and pop with her raw, soulful vocals and for decades inspired rock singers to imitate her sultry sensuality and emotional potency, which were heard as clearly on records as they were on can be seen on the stage.
While early Ike & Tina hits like “Nutbush City Limits” and “Proud Mary” set the tone, it was their miraculous comeback in the ’80s that cemented their legacy. Turner’s confident mastery of the slick ’80s production trends on albums like Private Dancer and Break Every Rule made her the pop diva she was always meant to be, setting the tone for pop-rock anthems and power ballads for the next decades.
Janet Jackson explains why Tina Turner was a dreamer
Remember the famous introduction to “Proud Mary,” where she talks about loving it “nice and…rough.”
We all know that Tina Turner has faced some extremely rough moments in her life. But whatever fate threw at her, she had her life under control. One of her biggest hits was “We Don’t Need Another Hero,” but it was actually her who became that hero to many people. It seems as if their story has no beginning and no end; Their music has always been there – and it always will be.
Her life with Ike Turner, the rise and fall, is well documented; you can experience it first hand in the film “What’s Love Got To Do With It”. But I firmly believe that this chapter should finally be a thing of the past. When Tina celebrated her comeback in the eighties, her success took on much greater proportions. The focus of her story is not victimhood, but rather triumph.
Tina Turner had the gift of making dreams come true
The beginning of her career was about hard times and unvarnished reality – just think of a song like “Nutbush City Limits”; that was her story. But as the years went by, that story took on a different shape – and their music reflected the changes. Tina has the gift of dreaming and making those dreams come true.