Entertainment

BREAKING: ”Queen of rock ‘n’ roll’ Tina Turner dies at 83″

Published

2 years ago

May 24, 2023

American-born singer Tina Turner, who left a hardscrabble farming community and abusive relationship to become one of the top recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at the age of 83.

She died peacefully after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland, her representative said.

In the 1950s Turner began her career during the early years of rock and roll and evolved into an MTV phenomenon.

In the video for her chart-topping song “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” in which she called love a “second-hand emotion,” Turner epitomized 1980s style as she strutted through New York City streets with her spiky blond hair, wearing a cropped jean jacket, mini skirt, and stiletto heels.

With her taste for musical experimentation and bluntly-worded ballads, Turner gelled perfectly with a 1980s pop landscape in which music fans valued electronically-produced sounds and scorned hippie-era idealism.

Sometimes nicknamed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Turner won six of her eight Grammy Awards in the 1980s. The decade saw her land a dozen songs on the Top 40, including “Typical Male,” “The Best,” “Private Dancer” and “Better Be Good to Me.” Her 1988 show in Rio de Janeiro drew 180,000 people, which remains one of the largest concert audiences for any single performer.

By then, Turner had been free from her marriage to guitarist Ike Turner for a decade.

The superstar was forthcoming about the abuse she suffered from her former husband during their marital and musical partnership in the 1960s and 1970s. She described bruised eyes, busted lips, a broken jaw and other injuries that repeatedly sent her to the emergency room.

“Tina’s story is not one of victimhood but one of incredible triumph,” singer Janet Jackson wrote about Turner, in a Rolling Stone issue that placed Turner at No. 63 on a list of the top 100 artists of all time.

“She’s transformed herself into an international sensation – an elegant powerhouse,” Jackson said.

In 1985, Turner gave a fictional turn to her reputation as a survivor. She played the ruthless leader of an outpost in a nuclear wasteland, acting opposite Mel Gibson in the third instalment in the Mad Max franchise, “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.”

Most of Turner’s hit songs were written by others, but she enlivened them with a voice that New York Times music critic Jon Pareles called “one of the more peculiar instruments in pop.”

“It’s three-tiered, with a nasal low register, a yowling, cutting middle range and a high register so startlingly clear it sounds like a falsetto,” Pareles wrote in a 1987 concert review.

Entertainment

Davido : I Never Imagined I Will Get This Big

… I feel like every successful person that attains a great level of success can’t explain the feeling.

Published

6 hours ago

May 9, 2025

OhiBaba

Grammy nominee and multiple awards winner, David Adeleke aka Davido has explained that he didn’t imagine he was going to become a global star at thr initial stage of his career.

Davido made this known in a recent chat with Apple Music during the promotion of his fifth album entitled ‘5ive.’

“Never imagined it here. Forget it. I’ll be lying to you. Never imagined it. So when things were just happening over time, we were just taking in the strides like, “Damn, this is getting lit.”

We sold out 1,000. We sold out 2,000. Damn, we sold out 30, 40… Yeah, so it’s never really… I feel like every successful person that attains a great level of success can’t explain the feeling. You know what I’m saying?

“I think just generally in life when good things are happening so quick, you don’t realize. I actually remember the first time I was sitting in front of my laptop opening Logic and sitting down like, “Damn, I want to make it. I actually want to be a musician. This is what I want to do.”

“Watching MTV Cribs, watching people go on tour. I was a big YouTuber. I used to watch YouTube a lot. I used to watch vlogs. Tour vlogs, so it’s like Soulja Boy vlogs, just people about just being popular and being a star.

I used to watch all that stuff, so I saw it transition into reality for me. Do you understand?

“From the beginning, from showing my friends the culture, showing my friends like, “Come listen to this Nigerian music.”

And then, actually falling in love with the genre, falling in love with music, knowing that my family’s not going to accept this, but I’ll still do it anyway, not knowing that I’ll be one of the ones to pioneer it.”

Credit: The Nation

Entertainment

Timaya, Kizz Daniel, to Spice Giants of Africa Festival in Kigali

In a statement, Ujiri disclosed that the festival will bring together 320 young athletes from 20 African nations and more than 20,000 spectators for a week of community, culture, basketball, education, and entertainment.

Published

6 hours ago

May 9, 2025

OhiBaba

This year’s Giants of Africa Festival will be a celebration of basketball, entertainment, and service to the community.

The week-long festival will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, from July 26 to August 2, with such stars as Kizz Daniel, Uncle Waffles, Timaya, and others lined up to spice the show.

Giants of Africa is a non-profit organisation dedicated to empowering African youth through basketball.

It was founded by Nigeria’s Masai Ujiri, who is the Vice-Chairman and President of the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club of Canada, which plays in the NBA.

” The festival will unite communities, spark potential, and drive transformative change across the continent. Explaining the year’s celebration, Ujiri said in a statement: “Like these kids, I grew up on the continent. As Africans, we know the landscape and what the kids go through.

We know they dream just like we did, and it really inspires me because those kids have so much more talent and intelligence; they have ways to communicate now that we didn’t.

This festival is about showing them that there is a path. We want them to never stop dreaming.”

Entertainment

“Free my guy”, Davido calls for the release of VeryDarkMan

In a tweet, Davido highlighted the positive impact VDM has had on people’s lives, despite the controversies surrounding him

Published

4 days ago

May 5, 2025

OhiBaba

Afrobeats star Davido has expressed solidarity with social media activist VeryDarkMan, who is currently detained.

The arrest reportedly occurred shortly after he visited a branch of a new generation bank to complain about alleged unauthorised transactions from his mother’s account.

In a tweet, Davido highlighted the positive impact VDM has had on people’s lives, despite the controversies surrounding him.

The Grammy nominee noted that the outpouring of support for VDM is encouraging and motivates him to do more for the masses.

“Outside all the noise, it’s good to see that the good one does impact lives, and people appreciate it!

The support I’m seeing for VDM everywhere is encouraging, making one want to do more for the masses.