Why Karen Carpenter Matters

Name: Why Karen Carpenter Matters
Rating: 5 (3 reviews)

Karen Tongson

2019년 6월 · University of Texas Press

5.0

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In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy—the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder.

In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose Filipino musician parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame with her own trans-Pacific journey between the Philippines—where imitations of American pop styles flourished—and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California. Tongson reveals why the Carpenters' chart-topping, seemingly whitewashed musical fantasies of "normal love" can now have profound significance for her—as well as for other people of color, LGBT+ communities, and anyone outside the mainstream culture usually associated with Karen Carpenter’s legacy. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters’ sound, while finding the beauty in the singer's all too brief life.

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5.0

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Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries. She is professor of gender and sexuality studies, English, and American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She co-hosts the podcasts The Art of Grief and The Gaymazing Race, and her writing has appeared in Slate, NPR Music and The Los Angeles Review of Books among other venues.