The National Recording Registry is not a commercial chart. It is not a Grammy. It is an institutional judgment, made by the agency responsible for preserving the national cultural heritage, about which recordings are important enough to ensure their survival. The 2020 addition of “What’s Love Got to Do with It” was the Library of Congress’s formal statement that this recording belongs in that category.
The company the song keeps on the Registry — which includes everything from Edison cylinder recordings from the 1890s through hip-hop and jazz and classical and country and folk recordings of the twentieth century — is appropriate for a song that the American institution responsible for cultural preservation has identified as significant. “What’s Love Got to Do with It” is now, officially, in the American cultural record.
The Library of Congress addition also puts a specific frame around what Terry Britten and Graham Lyle wrote and what Tina Turner recorded in 1984: not a commercial artifact that happened to be successful, but something that the culture will carry forward. The song will be listened to by people not yet born when this article is written. The voice on the recording — forty-four years old in 1984, mature and controlled and expressive in ways that a younger voice could not have been — will be part of what those future listeners know about what American popular music sounded like in the 1980s.
The rock and roll era produced a relatively small number of recordings that achieve this kind of cultural permanence. The criteria are imprecise — cultural permanence is not something you can measure while it is happening — but the Library of Congress’s judgment is one of the more reliable available proxies for it. By that measure, “What’s Love Got to Do with It” has achieved what few pop records do: genuine, institutionally recognized permanence.