Reasons to LIVE! No. 3 -- Tina Turner vs. Elon Musk/Hurst/Katharine Graham

My Pop Culture Picks

Tina Turner Vs. Elton Musk

Tina Turner remains a guiding light for me two years after her death, and lately I’ve been taking strength and resolve from politically relevant tracks on her 1984 blockbuster album, Private Dancer, and the 1985 soundtrack to her film, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I’ve compiled all these songs on my Tina Apocalypse playlist.

Of course, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” and “One of the Living” from the Mad Max soundtrack fit this moment perfectly with their dystopian lyrics about overcoming hopelessness and powerlessness while facing off against an oppressive regime.

Especially “One of the Living,” with the line, “Don’t want to fight/But sometimes you’ve got to,” has been fueling me to keep making calls to my Representatives and keep working to platform queer voices wherever possible. Plus, I love imagining Tina is our bold leader in the fight against Trump and Musk.

I find similar themes at play in a few album cuts from Private Dancer, which was recorded in 1983 and 1984 in London — in the middle of the Cold War between Russia and the U.S., and the pro-business, anti-labor ethos of Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s England.

Taking that environment into consideration, I hear Tina’s version of “Steel Claw” as an indictment of broken campaign promises allowing the rich to get richer. As I listen to the song in 2025, I see in my mind’s eye Musk and Trump riding together in a speeding Cybertruck with gleaming, steel panels flying off and crushing the working people they're whisking past. What a metaphor for DOGE.

Tina closes Private Dancer with a cover of David Bowie’s “1984,” evoking the Big Brother nightmare of Orwell’s book of the same name. As legal U.S. residents are being locked up and deported with no due process, we should all heed the line in that song, “Beware the crushing jaw.” I’m currently reading Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot, which takes this song out of the “nostalgic ’80s dread” category for me and places it squarely in modern day America as Trump continues to worship at Putin’s feet.

The opening track on Private Dancer, “I Might Have Been Queen” is the ultimate anthem on this playlist.

I always get chills listening to this tale of Tina contemplating her past lives as royalty in contrast to her reality in this most recent life as a Black child of the Jim Crow south — “I remember a girl in a field with no name.” Tina’s role as the survivor she became as she left her abusive husband and musical partner to go out on her own weighs heavily on this song’s narrative describing empires falling and new nations rising up from the ashes. From our vantage point today, we know the icon Tina became as sold out stadiums around the world. But that wasn’t yet the reality when she recorded “I Might Have Been Queen.” I hear this song as Tina’s declaration of faith, both in her spirit and in her future.

As we learned from her Tina’s HBO documentary, the trauma of repeatedly recounting her abusive marriage to Ike Turner in press interviews took a toll on her. Thankfully, she found refuge living the rest of her life in Europe with her love, Erwin Bach. I want to acknowledge Tina’s humanity and her trauma, but right now I’m finding strength in the larger-than-life gumption and fire Tina delivers in this collection of songs as inspiration to fight global oppressive forces.

Of note, Lady Gaga’s new track, “The Beast,” totally includes a musical nod to Tina’s “One of the Living,” so I included in on this playlist to both point to Tina’s ongoing influence in pop and to remind myself of the subversive power of queer sex in this time of oppression. Unleash the beast inside, indeed. Then I added the anthems “1000 Doves” and “Babylon” from Chromatica because they also read for me as defiant joy in the face of crushing forces. Don’t forget to dance and feed your soul as we keep fighting, y’all!

Oh, and get your tickets for Gaga’s Mayhem Ball this fall!

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Hurst’s Queer Overanalysis Jam

New artist Hurst’s song “Time Machine” caught my ear because I hard relate to this song about the pitfalls of learning about your partner’s exes.

My husband, Clint, used to get so pissed off when he ran across any of my exes in Nashville. He’d just moved to town when we started dating in 2015, and I’d lived my entire adult life there! So, gay ghosts were lurking around every corner. Thankfully, that’s no longer an issue now that we’ve had a decade together…and we no longer live in Nashville.

Hurst releases “Time Machine” in celebration of his third anniversary with his boyfriend, Justin. Aw!

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A Pioneering Woman of Politics and Journalism

The new documentary, Becoming Katharine Graham, wasn’t full of new information for me so much as it was a reminder of why this woman inspired me in the first place.

In high school, I became fascinated with the Watergate scandal that ultimately ended the Nixon presidency. It seems like small potatoes now compared to Trump’s daily crime sprees, but it took a lot of guts for Katharine Graham, then publisher of The Washington Post, to continue having her team report on the break-in at the Democratic campaign headquarters and the Nixon administration’s efforts to cover it up — especially when other papers weren’t covering the story or picking up the Post’s reporting until well into the scandal.