The 1989 song Tina Turner knew would last forever: “This is the best moment”
For Tina Turner to have created something entirely timeless and without limitation was a greater achievement than many people would ever appreciate.
After all, the greatest period of her career arrived long after many would have already given up on their dreams of being a star. Yet at the same time, it seemed as though, with every trial, with every setback, and with every hurdle that life sent her way, Turner only became more steadfastly focused on what she knew she always deserved.
That was fame and fortune, yes, but it was also a simple sense of happiness and contentment that she had long sought out. You certainly don’t need acclaim and an illustrious music career to achieve that, of course, but it was still something that the singer had been denied through years of relationship breakdowns and violence.
In short, the feeling of freedom and a sense of excitement about even the mundane things the world has to offer was the moment that she knew all her struggles had been worth it. For that, ‘The Best’ was not just a marker of boozy nights or football terraces, but the real feeling that Turner had, at long last, struck into life’s gold mine.
All that unbridled joy ultimately gave way to something far bigger and more important than the basics of the song itself. “It will last,” Turner espoused, “Simply ‘The Best’ is an anthem. It is a song where I felt it didn’t necessarily have to be about two people. It is between animals, the beauty of a car, a horse, a thing, and that is what I sang about.”
You could laugh this off and see it as utterly random and irrelevant on the face of it. But ultimately, Turner was right: the song will truly outlast all of us, and that is precisely because it is not tied to one rigid notion of romance or companionship. It can be anything, everything, and for everyone. Its universality is exactly what makes it so loved.
The singer herself realised this more than anyone. “That is why I did the video, of course, riding a horse, saying, ‘This is the best moment of when the wind is in your hair, and you’re riding, and the freedom of all of that’. It covers a lot of things, ‘The Best’,” she noted, not at all inaccurately. The song truly has no motive: it’s just about being happy.
Something about that lack of inhibition proves that we need a song like ‘The Best’ more than ever in today’s world. Things may seem endlessly dark and unfathomably bleak at times, but do you know what? Run to a field. Get on a horse. Feel the wind whipping your face. Only then might you understand what Turner meant in that moment.
The song was truly a symbol that, at long last, something good had finally come upon the singer. She could have been forgiven for bottling that feeling up and keeping it all to herself, after everything she had been through to get there. Yet the mark of the woman was that she decided to share that with everyone else, and in doing so, proved that she was indeed the very best of us.
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