Book Review: Why Karen Carpenter Matters, by Karen Tongson (2019)

Professor and author Karen Tongson, with her book Why Karen Carpenter Matters, published by the University of Texas Press, 2019.

Karen and Richard Carpenter, sometime in the 1970's. Those sweaters are amazing.

Karen Carpenter playing the drums. Her "lead sister" shirt comes from a Japanese journalist asking her what it was like to be the "lead sister" of the group. (He meant to say "lead singer.") Karen proudly adopted the mistranslation.

The Carpenters: that ultra-smooth, brother sister duo who were so big in the 1970’s, making melodic music that even your Grandma could enjoy. (Grandma didn’t really “get” the Beatles after they grew mustaches for Sgt. Pepper.) But these two toothy, clean-cut kids from Downey, California who wore nice clothes? (Well, Richard’s hair was a little long, but you know, that was the fashion these days…) Grandma went over for their smooth harmonies in a big way. And that Karen was just so adorable! 

Some forty years after the Carpenters had their heyday on the pop music charts, does Karen Carpenter, in fact, matter? Professor Karen Tongson thinks so. Her 2019 book Why Karen Carpenter Matters is part of the University of Texas Press’ “Music Matters” series. (Another volume in the series is Why the Beach Boys Matter, which I reviewed here.) Tongson comes from a completely different cultural background from Richard and Karen Carpenter, but their music has been a touchstone for her throughout her life. To begin with, Tongson was named after Karen Carpenter. Because of that, I think it would be hard not to have a serious connection to their music. 

Tongson’s cultural critique of the Carpenters’ music sets the duo in a cultural context. Tongson was born in 1973 in the Philippines, a country that still reveres the Carpenters. Tongson’s parents were both musicians, and her mother, a singer, prided herself on sounding a good deal like Karen Carpenter. 

Tongson has a fascinating detail about a Filipino karaoke machine that mistranslated the line “white lace and promises” in “We’ve Only Just Begun” as “whiteness and promises.” (p.5) And that would seem to be exactly what the Carpenters offer their audience: the promise of whiteness, of strip malls and suburbs, the kind of fantasy that the group seemed to be selling on the cover of their 1973 album Now and Then. Although the Ferrari Daytona that Richard is driving is very flashy, and probably outside the means of a great deal of the Carpenters’ audience. Better to aspire to say, a Chevy Monte Carlo with a landau top. 

When Tongson’s family moved to Southern California in the mid-1980’s, she was filled with fantasies of fitting in perfectly in her new suburban neighborhood. She wanted to fit in. But even Karen and Richard Carpenter had trouble fitting into a perfect life. Karen and Richard’s personal lives were more turbulent than their smoothly polished harmonies. Richard went to rehab in early 1979 for an addiction to Quaaludes. Karen sought treatment for the anorexia nervosa that eventually led to her death from a heart attack in 1983. The fantasy of a perfect life remained just that: a fantasy.

Growing up in the 1980’s and 1990’s I don’t really recall hearing the Carpenters’ music very much. The oldies radio station, KOOL108, didn’t seem to ever play them. The radio station I listened to the most in high school, the retro cool KLBB, played Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bobby Darin, and other “easy listening” oldies. KLBB would sometimes play “(They Long to Be) Close to You” and “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and that was about as recent as KLBB got. When I was trying to track down Frank Sinatra’s then out-of-print 1957 album Close to You, I always had to tell music stores clerks, “No, not the Carpenters’ album.” I knew that the Carpenters were brother and sister, and that Karen had died young, but that was the extent of my knowledge. 

Listening to the Carpenters now, I’m struck by Karen’s beautiful, emotive voice, Richard’s arranging talents, and their fantastic harmonies. Karen and Richard’s voices blended so well, but it was clear early on that Karen was an outstanding lead singer. This eventually pushed her out from behind the drum kit to take center stage, a move that she seems to have been ambivalent about. Rock critic Lester Bangs didn’t care for the Carpenters—surprise, surprise!—and he criticized their live show, saying that Karen “just doesn’t give you much to look at,” since she was playing the drums and singing. (p.18) I think Bangs’ criticism misses the mark, but he makes a point, intentional or not, about how the Carpenters’ staging was subverting rock music stereotypes. The two lead singers are behind the piano/keyboard and the drums. Those are both instruments that you can’t move around very much. You can be animated as you play them, but you generally have to remain in the same place while you play them. This is very different from pretty much every other rock band, where the main members are either lead singers who aren’t playing an instrument—Mick Jagger, Robert Plant, Jim Morrison, Roger Daltrey—or lead singers who are playing guitars. The Carpenters’ simply looked different from pretty much every other band in the early 1970’s. Eventually, they acquiesced to the norm and stuck Karen out front. Side note: I wonder if Karen playing the drums made it cooler/more acceptable for women to play the drums during the 1970’s? 

The Carpenters were always looking backwards. Their single “Yesterday Once More” is a perfect example. In 1973, it referred to the “oldies but goodies” that influenced Richard and Karen Carpenter to become musicians in the first place. Now, in 2019, the song is also a tribute to the Carpenters themselves. “Every woah-a-oh still shines,” Karen sings. And it does still shine, because her voice is still beautiful and powerful and full of emotion that she stirs in us. All these years later, Karen Carpenter still matters.