## The Private Dancer Album Track by Track: What Each Song Contributed
Beyond “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” the Private Dancer album deserves attention as a coherent body of work rather than a single hit surrounded by filler.
“Better Be Good to Me,” produced by Rupert Hine, is the most overtly rock-inflected track on the album — a direct address from a narrator who has been in situations that didn’t serve her and is not interested in returning to them. The lyric is direct in a way that, given what the listener knew about Tina Turner’s biography by the time the album was released, carried a biographical resonance that the song’s composers may not have fully anticipated. It was this song that won the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance, and the choice is explicable: it’s a performance in which the control of the voice and the urgency of the lyric are perfectly calibrated.
The title track, “Private Dancer,” written by Mark Knopfler, is the album’s most unusual song — a first-person account from the perspective of a woman performing for money in a venue that requires her to set her own sense of herself aside. The specificity of the scenario and the flatness of the narrator’s tone create a kind of documentary bleakness that is unlike anything else on the album. Jeff Beck’s guitar solo, spare and precise, underscores the tone. Tina Turner sings the lyric without sentimentalizing it or dramatizing it — she delivers it with the same evenness that the character would need to survive the situation.