Why Karen Carpenter Matters by Karen Tongson

Author:Karen Tongson [Tongson, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2019-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

– 5 –

QUEER HORIZON

At the height of her fame, Karen’s distorted physical self-image worsened when she was confronted with her own figure everywhere: on album covers, in magazines and newspapers, and on television. Add to that the unyielding work ethic their middle-class parents indoctrinated them with, and inevitably the pressure became impossible to conceal even beneath the Carpenters’ unperturbed veneer. Karen had to be hospitalized for exhaustion and malnutrition in 1975 due to a punishing work schedule compounded by her secret struggle with anorexia nervosa.

At that high point in their careers, the dogged perfectionism the Carpenters modeled in their recording practice saturated whatever interstitial moments remained of their everyday lives. In 1975, shortly after they had to cancel their lucrative fall overseas tour because of her undisclosed “illness,” Karen admitted in an interview with Ray Coleman for Melody Maker: “Richard and I have never had a vacation. And it’s stupid for the two of us to let it get carried to that amount of work and it turned out to be harmful for me. It’s going to be a whole learning process for me to do things in a different way [and] to really seriously calm down and do things at a slower pace, because I’m very regimented. . . . I go to bed at night with a pad by the bed and the minute I lie down it’s the only quiet time of the day. My mind starts going: ‘This has gotta be done, that’s gotta be done, you’ve gotta call this.’”1

This forced interruption due to Karen’s physical collapse after unrelenting road and recording schedules also marked the start of a precipitous decline in the Carpenters’ chart dominance from the first half of the 1970s.

By the end of 1975, the Carpenters were on the waning side of what Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys cannily described as an act’s “imperial phase,” or a performer’s commercial and cultural peak.2 From 1970 to 1975, the Carpenters logged twelve top-ten hits, including three number-one and five number-two singles, for a total of fourteen gold records. Even their lowest-charting hit of that era lingered on the cusp of the top ten at number twelve, 1972’s “It’s Going to Take Some Time.”

After 1975 only one of their songs would reach the Billboard top twenty, let alone approach the top ten: their cover of Herman’s Hermits’ “There’s a Kind of Hush” peaked at number twelve in 1976. None of their releases after that would even come close. Their 1975 album Horizon, with covers of the Eagles’ “Desperado” and Neil Sedaka’s “Solitaire,” and original hits like “Only Yesterday,” was their first LP to fall short of multiplatinum status, even though it was widely praised by critics for being their most sophisticated album to date. The duo took advantage of recent studio upgrades at A&M to even further perfect their pristine sound, with brand-new twenty-four-track decks and 30 Dolby. While their follow-up, A Kind of Hush (1976), also ultimately went gold, their subsequent albums failed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.