(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.