Looking Back, Now & Then: The Modern Times of Carpenters and Japan

What exactly was the overwhelming appeal the Carpenters had for the Japanese? Did it have something to do with the ethos of their image/sound that came through and resonated with them in a paralleled fashion, culturally/sociologically somehow? Did Karen’s voice and the softer sound represent a kind of America that didn’t feel threatening, but introspective, modest, and inviting? If quarters of the island are still regimented and socially conservative today, I can only imagine that back in the 1970s it was much more so. Did the Japanese read into and respond to the repression of suburban America, crystallized through Karen’s controlled, yearning sound? Could they have felt similarly? 

I think this is possibly why Now and Then and Yesterday Once More, as Ray Coleman put it, “hoisted their popularity to dizzy heights”. N&T’s cover gives a specific, idealized kind of American image, and it’s a literal image that suggests a lot more underneath than it was, of course, intended. There’s order to image, but something else there. Inside there’s two cleanly divided halves to the vinyl; one a hodgepodge variety of genres supposedly standing in for “now” (though Jambalaya is older than any song on either side), the other being a throwback to an older era with a medley of popular hits strung together/framed by a goofy disc jockey, and featuring Karen and Richard alternating lead vocals. The oldies medley sounds stilted and campy even by 1973 standards, yet that it doesn’t sound updated at all gives it an eerie feeling of being unable to leave the past behind. Musically they don’t do anything new with them besides the addition of Karen’s modern voice representing a new kind of world, one beginning to fray around the edges and suggesting a profundity of turmoil and melancholia at its center, somehow melding two realities. Karen looks back at the days of yore and scrubs clean the sheen just enough for you to contemplate why the songs were popular in the first place, how their naïveté and concealment of truth led to the desperate plea for honesty we hear in her own aural hues. 

(One could even think of the two siblings’ voices representing a kind of divide within the medley string; Richard’s lispy, hazy voice content with remaining in the past, remembering it without a lack of clear definition as heard by his tone and general playfulness, and Karen’s stark, clear, throughly unaffected voice representing a kind of (social) progression forward as she unearths some semblance of reality in the fantasy of America’s candy-land past.)

I wonder if this duality of both sides, each standing for “competing” ideas of popular culture (“now” representing the shifting, discordant moods of contemporary early 70s Japan/America, “then” acting as a placard for a kind of paralyzed, assembly-lined, tightly structured nostalgia, but still underlined with a human sound barely trying to conceal its complicated contradictions) the two forming a kind of singular whole, either side not yet knowing how to thrive or survive without the other. A musical equivalent of Newton’s cradle, the two ideological schools push each other backwards and forwards and the quiet tragedy is that neither seems to win out for eternity. 

Interestingly, this was the duo’s final album of their “classic/baroque” era - after this they head into a different, homogenized sound with Horizon before a shift downwards from which they never recovered from. Yesterday Once More, one of the two monster hits the album spawned, remains the anchor of the LP and the golden-brown-hued gem that shines brightly in any era, but reflects the time of its conception just as well. The song was released at the height of America’s collective hunger for the past, in no small part caused by the after effects of the war in Vietnam, endless political corruption, and an atmosphere of self-involvement, of licking wounds which for some came in the form of glancing back. 

What Karen accomplishes with her usual complete absence of vanity and self-pitying tendencies, is the human idea that our modernity will be defined by endless loops of looking back in terror of looking forward. Her signature, singular brand of detachment, as she delivers the mournful, resigned truths from her private world, crystallizes and foretells the ever-growing human obsession that we need the past to define the present; that our contemporary identities thrive on it to escape the possible realization of a potential lack of self in a world of various social structures that have, since the 70s, themself thrived on such an idea of a certain kind of self-devouring culture. (Karen reportedly balked at the idea that Richard and John Bettis had of awkwardly including the titles of past hits into the lyrics, which now gives the song a pristine universality as well as it having a relevance in standing beyond a global consumer/capitalist sway even as its trapped within in its hold by its very existence.) William Gibson wrote in 2001 that “...Japan is the global imagination’s default setting for the future”, in a statement that has only proven more true with time, and Karen’s voice demonstrated what this kind of future would be like and the Japanese caught on back then and for a possible assortment of reasons never let go.

Whenever we hear the musical output of the Carpenters it is always yesterday once more, it is always (for the most part) the 70s. The psyche-fracturing, soul-crushing, body-killing forces within and around Karen made sure that would be the case, that her precious young life would be, before long, nothing but yesterday’s. (In a terrifying way, Karen’s death and the manner of how it came about eerily foreshadows the long-standing torment and high suicidal rates of contemporary Japanese K-Pop stars who’s lives are robbed because of their expectancy to conform and adhere to a meticulously crafted public image.)

Now and Then represents the apex of their cultural and commercial influence/popularity, a quietly unsettling portrait (literally and figuratively) of two selves, two mindsets, and two nations struggling between what they are and what they could be. It’s an album for the Carpenters that symbolically stands as the dividing marker between two eras of their career, while simultaneously (and most likely unconsciously) paralleling the molecular social landscape in their homeland as well as the island that always made them feel at home no matter what the year. 

(I Long To Be) Close to Me: Karen Carpenter’s “Me Decade” Dilemma

If the “Me Decade” was about an American populace turning near completely inwards in fear of further disillusionment and anguish (therefore deepening just as much of both still and not realizing it), then Karen Carpenter’s richly introspective, intimate, endlessly searching voice was the voice to signify and define the variegated schizophrenic realities of the 1970s.

While the contrasting duality her voice and the turmoil of her persona in and of themselves are symbolic of her era, what more than anything underscores her significance is that her singular brand of introspection was completely without affectation or ego. The innate lack of self-aggrandizement she possessed and expressed through her tone, phrasing, and intonation stands in seemingly sharp contrast to a forever-changed landscape which, on the surface, wasn’t interested in such modest modes of communication anymore. In other words, Karen’s calm, measured, interior-like voice was not of the self-pitying, self-obsessed variety, but rather an empathetic one with hopes to open up something in others, while simultaneously striving to make small artistic statements that she could resolutely call her own. The emotional appeal of her voice is eternal, yet she particularly unearthed the underlying emotional vulnerabilities and plaintive sensibilities that even those locked within themselves, in fear of the world and people around them, had issues coming to terms with in the 70s. Her own personal, aching melancholy, a vehicle that uncovered the reality under the superficiality of the era.

What Karen alone inadvertently exposes is that the kind of supposed “introspection” of America in the 1970s was largely not of a forward-thinking nexus of social, emotional, and cultural discourse, but rather just a means of rippling self-indulgence, narcissism, and excess to escape any responsibility on a grand scale after the national scars formed in the late 60s. The direct praise she received from president Richard Nixon (a man who was in large part responsible for America’s early 70s upheaval) for being “young America at its very best” almost today seems like a silent apology; she’s tending to and soothing the wounds that he opened up for millions. Ironically, by the late 70s both Carpenters and Nixon were chucked aside by the American public, despite one clearly deserving of the treatment and the other utterly flummoxed as to why they could be treated in such a way after all they did to help — further conveying the frustrating, schizophrenic aura of the decade. The finding of the “true self” was often just as much of a self-deceiving lie as those of the ones American’s heard on a daily basis blaring from their televisions and radios.

If there is another shift within pop culture from the late 60s to the early 70s, it’s that while music is viewed as the supposed focal point for which American’s culturally gathered together around in the 60s, the 70s were the time that television, the image, became the dominant source of cultural “nourishment” for a hungry audience. Karen embodies the chasm between both periods (she did after all begin in 1969 being a representative of the era dressed as an innocent flower child); the aurally dominated 60s giving way to the image obsessed 70s that mocked and derided her public image because of its refusal to bend to the whims of hipness for its own sake, yet personifying a melding of one decade’s ostensible “truth” through her musicality, while staunchly representing a very specific wholesome, inoffensive, middle American sheen through media. She and Richard’s attempts at downplaying such squareness, in a striving to be seen as “normal” artists who simply make music, is a stark counterpoint to a world around them which desperately relied on an outwards personal concept of image for a sense of internal identity. Thus, when you take away the surface of wholesomeness you’ll find a buried concept of truth braided with artistry, the potentially painful combination that she sought to be celebrated for and recognized by.

Yet perhaps the biggest, most devastatingly tragic irony of Karen’s story and thriving popularity in this era is that her near total lack of ego - self-confidence, self-care, self-importance, self-worth, self-love - is exactly what led to her early death, when for so many it was the only way that they were able to survive and thrive. Her voice manifested such feelings and ideas to others, but she was unable to collect them within herself as a way of personal empowerment and defiant independence. Nothing demonstrates and encapsulates the darkest corners of human nature more than a throughly selfless individual, on a personal and professional scale, stripped of agency, love, worth, fulfillment and wholeness, while those around her demanded and were granted such rights of humanity. But the 1970s didn’t last forever.

Like the abyss forever echoing in Karen’s voice, the yearning search for a blissful inner life is timeless.