“I’ll give up all that other stuff, but only if I get to keep my name. I worked too hard for it, your honor.” — Angela Bassett as Tina Turner in What’s Love Got To Do With It, during the divorce from Ike
And now that she’s done using it, she’s sold it to BMG. To that I say…
Good for you, Anna Mae. Good. For. You.
Tina Turner has sold her music rights to BMG, the company’s CEO Hartwig Masuch tells Rolling Stone — marking the latest event in the trend of major legacy artists cashing in on their copyrights.
Included in the deal is Turner’s artist’s share for her recordings along with publishing rights, neighboring rights and her name, image and likeness.
(cont. Rolling Stone)
I know the entire script for What’s Love Got To Do With It. It has been one of my favorite movies for as long as I can remember and I can’t count all the people I’ve forced to watch it. When I was in boarding school, I had a little crush on a boy a couple of floors above me, and even though he had a girlfriend, I still made him watch What’s Love with me, because he was special. Fast forward around 8 or 9 months and he had broken up with his girlfriend. On a trip to a flea market he saw something I’d like and brought it back to the dorm with him. It was an old LP of Ike & Tina “Fool In Love,” a song he remembered from the first movie we watched together almost a year earlier. I still have that album too…
Anyway. I have a lot of memories connected to Tina Turner, so when I heard she sold all of her rights to not only her music but her likeness and her name, I was shocked. I knew how much she suffered building up that name, and I knew how hard she worked to rebuild it out from under the shadow of her abusive husband for the second act of her career. Why would she sell her legacy to a company? She has three living sons that she could leave it to. Isn’t that why we build empires and legacies, so our names and works can live on through the generation after us?
However, aside from the fact that I don’t know her family dynamics and it’s none of my business, sometimes money is better. Tina Turner has cashed out — if she wants to leave the money evenly to her sons, she can do that. You can’t split rights evenly. The heirs would have to agree on business deals over and over in perpetuity, and I’ve watched enough Prestige Dramas on HBO to never expect siblings to be on the same page about the direction of a company.
Perhaps more important than the next generation is the fact that Tina Turner is done. She started her victory lap with the Tina! musical and ended it with the Tina documentary on HBO. She’s been semi-retired from performing and recording since 2009, and now she has stepped completely out of the spotlight. Tina has been sharing pieces of herself with the public for sixty-five years and now she’s finished.
There’s something bittersweet about it. Cher will be performing until the wheels fall off. Madonna would rather launch herself into the sun than quietly retreat into private citizenry. We think of the great divas as women who can’t live without the crowds or the adoration or the creative act of putting new music together, but I’m not sure that’s something I ever felt from Tina Turner. Young Anna Mae was this great natural talent who didn’t sing like anybody else, didn’t move like anybody else, and didn’t look like anybody else, and she used her gifts. That’s what you’re supposed to do, but they’re forever intertwined with the man who discovered them and she’s never been able to find peace with it. When she said in the HBO documentary that she hasn’t had a good life, that the good doesn’t outweigh the bad she went through, I teared up. Here is the most iconic woman in Rock & Roll on the cusp of retiring from public life forever telling us she didn’t have a good life, because of all she went through to be Tina Turner.
And now she doesn’t have to be Tina Turner anymore. She’s done all she wants to do with it, so now she sold it to a company she trusts to protect her legacy. People build and sell businesses all the time, sometimes over and over. When Tom sold Myspace, nobody asked “what about your legacy!” He got the money from the sale to do whatever he wants to do with it. Selling the business of Tina Turner has netted Anna Mae millions (probably hundreds of millions) of dollars, but we only feel differently about it because we see a creative’s career as being more personally significant to the person than we do an entrepreneur’s career.
In this case, Tina Turner has been putting distance between herself and the public, herself and her career, for the past decade. And if anybody in music has earned the right to bow out on her own terms, it’s Tina Turner.
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