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.
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