I've Been Loving You Too Long

Ike and Tina Turner's perfectly disturbing version of the ballad.

Trapped between a plea and a threat, Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” finds its natural habitat in the Ike and Tina Turner Revue’s unhinged rendition. In a live performance, when Tina promises I don’t wanna stop now, as the script dictates, Ike interjects with a deadpan, improvised, because you’re not ready to die, practically yanking any tenderness from the duet. They quickly launch into a raunchy miming of a transactional over-rehearsed sex-act, with Tina caressing the microphone and Ike smacking his lips like he’s licking a clit. It’s excessive and grotesque and turns the song’s original soulful yearning into post coital whimpering, and in 1969, it’s a hit. The trance of well-decorated dysfunction, and in the case of Ike and Tina, utter malfunction, overrides its sloppiness and we’re left with forensics as music, a live confession that’s part reconciliation part renunciation, a wreck you cannot turn away from. The audience becomes invested in the suspense, part of it, anonymous enablers, forcing its performers or victims to maintain their derangements. Thus parades the cycle of spectacular eroticized violence.

  

The recorded version that topped the radio charts that year or edge of  a year, fascinates me for how its smooth revving is interrupted and altered by one solemn alienated stutter Tina manages toward the end  you-you doubled, mirroring address, accusatory and tentative and emphatic. Her recoiled devotion to her dynamic with husband, abuser, tyrant, teacher, Ike, slips out in this tripping over and between selves, a troubled spirit leaving a body that can no longer hide its excess of suffering without stumbling into confession, or their misguided fantasy in slow motion, relearning that it’s a nightmare.

Ike and Tina use this once-tender song to give one another refuge to be bitter and vindictive and pornographic aloud, to mercy fuck one another and switch roles, invisible switchblades flaring up in Ike’s dire, cocaine-induced fidgeting and clenching between verses. Tina is in front, on top, Ike submissively echoing the threats we know she’s a little numb to by now— we know this because her only response is to placate him by mimicking sex, pretending she doesn’t hear or notice him slyly threatening her life on stage, eyes dilated, nose frozen from drugs and vengeance. 

Brutality so habitual it becomes soothing and familiar, now has its anthem. Love so drastic it gives Tina’s voice claws and then steals them back and punishes her for them, has its witness in this garish cover of a hymn about duration. Maybe romance shouldn’t ache, but theirs does. Maybe the original version’s tormented purgatory is just as toxic and creates the perfect cracked vessel for Ike and Tina to reenact their trouble through. What if radio love is a ruins and its subjects reeling in wicked dedication, just a little too long?

The camp sincerity of Ike and Tina’s version of this song conceals how contrived and cyclical their rapport is becoming in private life. The subject has to become lust and the phallus, Tina has to violate herself and pretend it turns her on, otherwise we might catch glimpse of her mounting disgust with Ike. Shame makes her more brazen, resigned to spectacle. Victim becomes accomplice in the lie of excess, they put one another on like sad clown masks and through this performance, reassess the swarming misery of the ballad that seemed rooted in adoration before they mangled it and made it a caricature of their saga. 

The inertia of even the most poisonous codependency has a spirit of its own and cannot be squirmed out of timidly; breaking its spell requires aggressive reimagining of the self, repossessing of the self. Ike and Tina were possessed by one another and by the spirit of the public life together, their farce. The goal is to have no experience so blatantly degrading that their version of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” arouses the same poison adrenaline they exhibit on stage together, but we’ve all been loving someone too long to stop now, sometimes even simply the destructive version of ourselves we bargain with and leverage to get by. When a stutter, a small almost imperceptible break in the rhythm and change of pressure arrives like a magic talisman and we let it shrug and stumble and become a dream of a future departure from too long, we are Tina here, prop in her own life always on the verge of going off script, always about to pounce into new territory and remember the self as sacred. 

I’ve never seen a more obscene musical performance, mostly because you can tell that at the time each and every ridiculous or violent gesture between Ike and Tina has been normalized and codified— they thought they were fooling someone. Looking back at my own parents, at their obsessive dysfunction and the violence that kept them loving one another too long to stop, there’s a momentum that comes with pain inflicted so often it creates a tenderness in the bruising, a fondness for itself. There were similar rock-bottom moments that sprung up into decadent displays of union in their domestic performance. It gets to a point where both parties lean into it, almost viciously, daring anyone to notice and do something; where both are victims of their rituals of violence and the audience can be manipulated into being as accustomed to its codes as they are, even mistaking them for intimacy.

Ike and Tina here are at the stage where it’s so bad that everyone is complicit. But Tina is waking up from her trance on stage in front of us, doubling herself— ‘you/you’. She doesn’t want to come to resent herself as much as she does her abuser, for turning everyone she loves into a helpless witness. So she and him come together on stage as a to escape their secret selves by vulgarizing them. How else would we find a casual death threat in the middle of a love ballad and go on gawking and swaying past it, collaborating with them just a little too long to stop now?