“NOW HE GONNA BEAT IT UP / LIKE HIS FIRST NAME IKE”

I put up this old article from a ’98 VIBE on Ike Turner and it’s essential reading, for real. The writer, Anne Marlowe, examines how Ike was transformed in the public eye from semi-heralded musical genius into mythological “ultimate dangerous black male” almost singlehandedly by the cartoonified Tina biopic What’s Love Got to Do with it. Now, of course she doesn’t gloss over any of the parts where he actually was, indeed, abusive to Tina, because he was, and he was clearly a grade-a, hands-on misogynist. But she points out the double standards – how Elvis’s similar transgressions never get mentioned, and chronicles how his mythic-proportion public persona overshadowed and overwrote his place in music, as a national treasure. In the standard tradition of America’s music historians burying great black talents beneath their personal ills, of course – of holding black musicians to greater and more stringent personality litmus tests than their white counterparts. It’s what is happening to R Kelly, it’s what has happened to Michael Jackson, it’s what people tried to do with Mariah Carey. And with that, I leave you with my favorite non-Tina-related Ike Turner song, “Funky Mule,” which has the illest break I can think of – the bassline and the drums spar with the guitar in a singularly massive moment of, um, funkiness. When you listen to it your face will funky-mule right off. PS Who has sampled this track? Seems like something breaks freaks would go right in for.