The name she had fought to keep in the settlement was the name she used throughout the rebuilding years. There was no intermediate identity, no rebranding strategy of the kind that management consultants recommend to celebrities trying to distance themselves from a previous association. She was Tina Turner. She performed as Tina Turner. And when Tina Turner became, again, a name that meant something to large audiences, it was because the person who carried that name had maintained it through the years when it meant something smaller.
## Capitol Records, John Carter, and the Bet Against Conventional Wisdom
The story of John Carter’s role in signing Tina Turner to Capitol Records is a useful corrective to the narrative that the comeback was obvious, that anyone paying attention could have predicted what Private Dancer would do.
Carter was a music industry professional who had been around long enough to know what the conventional wisdom was, and the conventional wisdom, in 1983, about signing a forty-three-year-old Black woman from the R&B tradition, was skeptical. The market that Capitol was competing in was the MTV era — a market defined by visual youth, by music videos, by demographic categories that the music industry’s marketing departments had spent considerable resources defining and addressing.
Tina Turner didn’t fit the categories. She was too old, according to the calculations. She was not the kind of artist that the radio formats of 1983 were built around. The R&B tradition she came from had been through its own commercial evolutions and had arrived at a place that was somewhat separate from the mainstream pop market that Capitol needed to reach.