Karen Carpenter, Theodor Adorno, and the Radio; or, If Hooks Could Kill
For Tom Smucker
The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of thought.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
The Carpenters seem made to order for what Theodor Adorno in a famous essay called “the fetish-character in music and the regression of listening.”1 Nothing in the smooth, reified, even fetishistic sheen of songs such as “Close to You”—a brand of Los Angeles vernacular sentimental poetic production for the airwaves—suggests the potential for authentic aesthetic experience or expression. The apparently unbroken surface of this industrially manufactured sound, however, is in fact riven by longing, constriction, and discomfort, and I will argue that it constitutes a kind of negative dialectic of the L.A. that had so revolted Adorno during his exile there in the 1940s and early ’50s. In this sense the Carpenters provide an excellent test case for Adorno’s ideas about structural listening and the fate of aesthetic responsiveness in the age of radio (one of Adorno’s first activities upon his arrival in the United States was of course his work with Paul Lazarsfeld’s Princeton Radio Research Project). In Dialectic of Enlightenment (an L.A. story if ever there was one), Adorno and Max Horkeimer use the parable of Homer’s Sirens to theorize sonic experience in capitalist society, the only options being dogged sublimation (the rowers’ stopped-up ears) or beauty without consequence (Odysseus strapped, motionless, to the mast);2 it is tempting to suggest that by the time the Carpenter family moved to Downey, California, in 1963, the agon of Odysseus and the Sirens had been reduced to the upbeat oblivion of surfers and the Beach Boys. Yet when the Carpenters hit it big in 1970, deuce-coupe Fordism was already undergoing significant strain, and the contradictions of capital, urban space, cultural abundance, the nuclear family, and female power were registered—hideously, magisterially—in music that was calculatingly designed for the car radio and the quadraphonic sound system. The Caucasian blues of “Superstar,” “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Goodbye to Love,” “Hurting Each Other,” and others project the suburban whiteness of Downey—known for its aerospace industry, its surfing, its pioneering fast-food chains, and its racist police force—into a soundscape of pain and self-negation whose real-life counterpart came in Karen Carpenter’s notorious death from anorexia at the age of thirty-two. Read right, in other words, the Carpenters’ music speaks symptomatically of the “damaged life” Adorno espied in L.A.’s endless summer.3
It is amusing, I’ll allow, to catalog some of the ways in which the Carpenters story suggests a willfully antiliberatory ethos—political, personal, and musical. The brother-sister duo looked almost freakishly alike, their visages on album covers and in photo shoots frozen into the same rictus of compulsory cheerfulness. This aura of sibling sameness is often represented pictorially and musically as a marriage of true talents, an endogamous involution that further resists the incursion of difference. The motivating product behind—or consequence of—this imaginary is a series of hit songs overdetermined by repetition, calculation, sameness: the same sweet bummer vibe in song after song of lost or unrequited love set to arrangements that blur one into the next, featuring Phil Spector–like choruses of background vocals made up solely of Karen and Richard Carpenter’s multiply overdubbed voices. One of their first big hits, “We’ve Only Just Begun” (1970), was originally a bank commercial jingle—at a single stroke fulfilling exponentially Adorno’s nightmare of culture-industry commodification. By all accounts, Richard Carpenter and his lyricist, John Bettis, not infrequently wrote to a precise formula. Richard and Karen both insisted that their stage show perfectly reproduce—without variation from show to show in a punishing touring schedule—their already overcalculated recordings. Their record company, Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss’s A&M Records, was careful to market the group only in terms that conformed to the public’s perception of them as bland and square.4 In 1973 the Carpenters accepted Richard Nixon’s invitation to perform at the White House during a state visit by West German chancellor Willy Brandt and basked in the president’s description of them as “young America at its best,” thus officially becoming the musical face of Nixon’s “silent majority.”5 The group dominated early seventies easy-listening FM radio formats, which had been built on the kind of administrative audience research Adorno decried in his work with Lazarsfeld.6 If to Adorno standardization was the watchword and the death knell of cultural forms produced by industrial means, the Carpenters embraced those means perhaps more fully than any best-selling pop band of their moment.
The fetish-character of the Carpenters sound is evident all across the hits they carefully packaged in 1973 as Singles 1969–1973, which sold many millions of copies upon its release. In the very first notes of the album’s brief opening snippet of “Close to You” comes a piano-and-vibraphone isomorphism whose crystalline ring sounds like a perfectionist’s manifesto. (Since the song in its entirety closes the album, the placement of this little excerpt out front, an interesting packaging move in its own right, makes the record go in a self-enclosed circle, ending where it begins.) The cordoned-off “classical” piano-and-strings segment that opens the group’s dolorous cover of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” could have given Adorno the fatal heart attack he suffered the year they recorded it; nor is the band above studio tricks such as the overamplified closed hi-hat strikes that begin each verse of “Superstar,” only to recede deep into the mix. The absurdly incongruous fuzz-guitar solo on “Goodbye to Love” is so deliciously overwrought that you can hear the guitarist’s pick torturing the strings. And the Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass horns that come out of nowhere in the middle of “Close to You” sound like nothing so much as a gold-plated gearshift thrown in to drive the tune into a new key. Even these obvious examples of Richard Carpenter’s gifts as an (over)arranger understate his ability to turn calculated simulation into a brand: the “Herb Alpert” horns I just mentioned were played by Chuck Findley, since Alpert himself wasn’t available the day of the session.7
Meanwhile, Karen Carpenter’s voice is unmatched in its ability to summon a languid melancholy that is somehow at the same time evacuated of personality. This is what Robert Christgau was referring to, I think, when he spoke long ago of “Karen Carpenter’s ductile, dispassionate contralto.”8 Aside from the self-mortgaging “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the unconvincingly upbeat “Top of the World,” and the infantile “Sing,” all the songs on Singles are downers—full of rainy days, Mondays, fugitive rock star lovers, so-longs to love, embraces of loneliness, nostalgia for better days, romantic skepticism, pain, and longing. Yet you never get the sense that the persona being crafted is really going through anything; as Roland Barthes says in “The Grain of the Voice,” “everything in the (semantic and lyrical) structure is respected and yet nothing seduces, nothing sways us to jouissance.” The art is, as Barthes could justifiably have said of Karen Carpenter, “inordinately expressive (the diction is dramatic, the pauses, the checkings and releasings of breath, occur like shudders of passion) and hence never exceeds culture: here it is the soul which accompanies the song, not the body”—an effect of breath, not the grain of the voice. “The lung, a stupid organ,” writes Barthes, so unlike the throat.9
Fetishized, segmented, voided: a perfect case, one would think, of Adorno’s contention that to broadcast (and by extension record) music in the commercial culture industries is to make it impossible. Adorno’s work on aesthetics and the radio came at the intersection of three closely related concerns: a post-Hegelian philosophy of music, both serious and popular; a philosophical and methodological critique of the culture industry and its own commercial research practices as well as prevailing U.S. trends in social research; and a critical encounter with U.S. cultural life, first in New York City and then in Los Angeles, in which German fascism seemed recapitulated in laissez-faire leisure society. The conjuncture of at least these matters put Adorno on high-minded lookout for art forms that in their structural integrity could produce part-and-whole dialectics that resisted the wholly administered tendency of modern Western societies and the increasingly one-dimensional political economies that characterized them. The administrative research of Lazarsfeld’s project, as David Jenemann splendidly documents in Adorno in America, struck Adorno as “sneering empiricist sabotage” that, instead of examining radio programming in the context of a total social situation of production, distribution, and consumption in whole social fields structured in precisely identifiable if contradictory ways, took audience likes and dislikes at their word, among other things mistaking values for facts—a conspiracy of bean counters complicit with the logic of social domination.10 The radio as he found it upon his arrival to the United States in 1938 not only used aesthetic forms to sell products but thereby turned those forms themselves into commodities, canceling their aesthetic value and binding them and their listeners ever more firmly to the everyday harmony of unfreedom. It was the task of criticism to expose this:
Chesterfield is merely the nation’s cigarette, but the radio is the voice of the nation. In bringing cultural products wholly into the sphere of commodities, radio does not try to dispose of its culture goods themselves as commodities straight to the consumer. In America it collects no fees from the public, and so has acquired the illusory form of disinterested, unbiased authority which suits Fascism admirably. The radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Fuhrer…. The gigantic fact that the speech penetrates everywhere replaces its content, just as the benefaction of the Toscanini broadcast takes the place of the symphony.
(Dialectic, 159)
This is doomy, no doubt; but here and elsewhere Adorno’s insistence on the dialectical rehearsal of the entire situation of entertainment reception is, I would argue, crucial to any lasting sense of aesthetic possibility. I have argued elsewhere that, contrary to thinking of aesthetics as a ruse or repository of ugly political animus—antidemocratic investments in “standards” or normative notions of taste, for example—we should pursue its democratic reclamation. The problem with aesthetics is not (pace Terry Eagleton) that it’s a bourgeois illusion but that it’s too often a bourgeois reality; we ought to be arguing for more of it for more people, not less of it for the few.11 To the extent that the culture industries debase aesthetic possibility, Adorno is there, with no little sympathy I might add, to suggest why. “The customers of musical entertainment are themselves objects or, indeed, products of the same mechanisms which determine the production of popular music. Their spare time serves only to reproduce their working capacity. It is a means instead of an end…. Popular music is for the masses a perpetual busman’s holiday.”12
For working people beaten down by the same political economy that sponsors (in every sense) their leisure time, the labor of aesthetic responsiveness takes a backseat to escape and distraction—which in turn delivers them each Monday to the same labor routine. Inducing relaxation because its products are patterned and predigested, according to Adorno, “The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu” (Dialectic, 139). However much Adorno’s approach could slide into somewhat moralistic condemnations of everything from jazz to astrology, it would be silly to discount the pressures he outlines on the creation of a genuinely popular aesthetic—just as Adorno’s framing of such pressures here will return to animate—and haunt—the work the Carpenters produced in the 1970s.
If that work depends on the techniques or at least commercial requirements of repetition, standardization, and the other culture-industry attributes Adorno relentlessly critiqued,13 might it be worth looking further into their shape and resonance and effects in the contexts that produced and embraced them? I am inspired here by Adorno’s remarks about “immanent criticism” in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” written in Los Angeles in 1949. There Adorno argues that the contradictions or inadequacies of form or meaning in artistic products may dialectically suggest the social forces that deformed them—by indicating how “untrue” they are to the social field they claim to represent. The forms themselves are not untrue, writes Adorno, but rather their pretension to correspond to reality: “Immanent criticism of intellectual and artistic phenomena seeks to grasp, through the analysis of their form and meaning, the contradiction between their objective idea and that pretension. It names what the consistency or inconsistency of the work itself expresses of the structure of the existent.”14 What is worst about the Carpenters’ music, in other words, may also be what is best about it; in so fully giving form to one wing of the culture industry of its time, the group might be said to have “produced the concept” (à la Althusser) of turn-of-the-seventies Southern California unfreedom.15 On this view, it is less important to note the ways the Carpenters amount to a sort of sonic servitude than to look into how they cognitively map through aesthetic inadequacy the culture and subjectivity of one aspect of their historical moment. “A successful work, according to immanent criticism,” Adorno writes, “is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.”16 I’d like to try to show that the Carpenters, while seeming to opt for a “spurious harmony,” are all about its negation.
The sort of dialectical treatment Fredric Jameson describes—which would aim “not so much at solving the particular dilemmas in question, as at converting those problems into their own solutions on a higher level, and making the fact and the existence of the problem itself the starting point for new research”—is, I would contend, something to which the Carpenters have not as yet been subjected.17 This is not strictly true: there is the brilliant and corrosive 1987 Todd Haynes short film Superstar, which features Karen and Richard played by Barbie and Ken dolls (as Karen gets sicker the doll’s face is gradually whittled and sanded away) and which Richard managed to suppress in 1990 (though it’s now easily available on the Internet); there is Sonic Youth’s 1990 song “Tunic (Song for Karen)” (more on which later), an equally brilliant meditation on the singer’s fame and physical frame; and there is the 1994 tribute compilation, If I Were a Carpenter, of Carpenters songs covered by bands like Sonic Youth (an incredible reading of “Superstar”) and Babes in Toyland, which on the whole attempts to retrieve the group’s dark side. For that matter, Ray Coleman’s biography of the Carpenters is full of (usually oblique) testimony by fans and friends alike concerning the pain and emptiness of its principals’ inner lives and music. The present attempt draws on these readings to analyze further the ways in which something was very wrong in Downey.
I say in Downey rather than in the Carpenter family because the deformations that beset the family—and they were many—were endemic to the post–World War II suburban settlement. Downey, incorporated in 1956, lies in southeast L.A. at one of the busiest intersections in 1950s America: the crossroads of U.S. Highways 19 (the through route from Laguna Beach to Pasadena) and 42 (the road from L.A. to San Diego). Once the Interstate Highway System (officially authorized, probably not coincidentally, the year of Downey’s incorporation) had been completed, Downey was bordered by federal highways 710, 105, 605, and 5—perfectly plotted, that is to say, on the postwar map of state-sponsored highway construction under Eisenhower that helped push-pull suburban/inner-city racial and class formations into being. (Downey is cheek-by-jowl with relatively isolated Watts.) Eric Avila’s Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight offers an excellent account of the way in which this dialectic of chocolate city and vanilla suburb came about. Studying such institutional formations as Hollywood, Disneyland (opened in 1955), Dodger Stadium (built in time for the 1962 season), and the freeway system, Avila shows how mid-century L.A. was self-consciously made into a white or white-dominated city.18 As in other U.S. conurbations, housing in Los Angeles was concertedly racially redlined by a host of agencies and activities, not least among them the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Authority. Disney’s choice of Orange County’s Anaheim for the location of Disneyland certified the sanitized suburban ethos he meant to foster there. Dodger Stadium was set down atop a working-class Chicano neighborhood in an attempt by city fathers to “renew” the historic downtown area. Key to this entire system was the freeway, whose supplanting of an extensive, demographically diverse, public streetcar system cemented the new urban regime of privatized, racially segmented living. (As California historian and activist Carey McWilliams put it in 1965, the “freeways have been carefully designed to skim over and skirt around such eyesores as Watts and East Los Angeles; even the downtown section, a portion of which has become a shopping area for minorities, has been partially bypassed.”)19 The figurehead for these developments, Avila observes, was Ronald Reagan, who aided the House Un-American Activities Committee in its quest for “subversive” influences in Hollywood, emceed the televised opening ceremonies at Disneyland, and appeared on live television to promote the building of Dodger Stadium (7). Reagan was of course governor of California from 1967 to 1975, precisely the years of the Carpenters’ ascendance.
The Carpenter family parachuted into this context from New Haven, Connecticut, in 1963, partly to get to better weather and partly to bolster Richard’s budding musical career (Richard was seventeen, Karen was thirteen). What they encountered in Downey was a city like the whole of L.A. on the cusp of post-Fordism, poised between the suburban commute, the service shop floor, and the entertainment business on one side and factory work (Karen and Richard’s father, Harold, worked in industrial printing) on the other. The very first Taco Bell had just opened there (in 1962; the fourth-ever McDonald’s had gone up there in 1953), and suburban homes and aviation factories had recently replaced the area’s farms. Two years after the Carpenters’ arrival, the 1965 uprising in next-door Watts made spectacular protest against the racial entailments of the area’s suburban splendors. The Carpenter family’s response to the cumulative force of these structures, as we will see, was to circle the wagons into a highly strung centripetally focused family unit that more or less ravaged its members, however upbeat they appeared on the surface. On the face of it, the kids reveled in clean-cut postwar L.A. youth culture: Karen’s lifelong affinity for burger joints (till the onset of her illness) and both siblings’ love of cars (Richard to this day remains a collector), while certainly not unique to Downey, are hardly coincidental. Of course L.A., perhaps more than any other city than Detroit, is the urban monument to the automobile. The Beach Boys memorialized that fact in “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and at least a dozen other great songs that undeniably capture a moment and an ethos of suburban white abundance and mobility. The Carpenters picked right up on this soundscape, similarly sublimating the blackness of car music such as Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” even as they offered a broadly whitened defense against it in the musical context of the late 1960s. If they turned it to the account of a very different sound, it’s worth noting that, like the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (and what the hell, the rest of them, too), each of the Carpenters caught the wave of catastrophe brought on by the ebullient sense, and sound, of plenty.
How this seeming paradox might have come about—that in a land and moment of abundance the result was constriction, loss, self-denial, and horror—has too often and too easily been ascribed to the bottoming out of the sixties into helter-skelter madness and murder, the now canonical (almost postcanonical) script to be found in, say, Joan Didion’s dispassionate odes to dispassion and disaffection, Play It as It Lays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and The White Album. Not in the Carpenters’ backyard did it happen this way, those moderate Republican friends of music bizzer (and sometime boyfriend of Karen’s) Mike Curb, leader of the popular whitebread middle-of-the-road singing group the Mike Curb Congregation, chair of the California Republican party during Reagan’s tenure as governor, and later himself the state’s lieutenant governor. So what was it? Clues exist everywhere in the Carpenters’ music: the sense of (suburban? automotive?) isolation conveyed in “Close to You,” an apparently dreamy evocation of intimacy that is in fact its opposite—“just like me / they long to be / close to you.” The sense there, too, of personal interchangeability, or the everyday monotony of routine and repetition that defines “Rainy Days and Mondays” (which “always get me down”), the latter a weekly certainty sure to give the singer, as she sings, “what they used to call the blues” (don’t they still?); or, again, the fragile (and rather frightening) hope articulated in the forced antidepressant “Top of the World” that, like the sudden joy of today, “tomorrow will be just the same.” We’re treading on pins and needles here, and it’s not a little ominous. Whence the will to melancholy in a willfully upbeat world? Did the Carpenters intuit something about the culture that produced them?
In my view, the Carpenters songs that thematize and, as it were, self-reflexively theorize their sound are those that speak most interestingly to the underside of El Dorado. “Superstar,” for example, these days surely the Carpenters’ signature song, limns the story of a groupie longing for the eponymous guitarist to come back to her: “Long ago, and, oh, so far away / I fell in love with you before the second show. / Your guitar, it sounds so sweet and clear, / But you’re not really here, it’s just the radio.”20 All somewhat ludicrous—she fell in love that fast? she forgot she’s listening to the radio?—until you consider that this is nothing less than a set of reflections on the culture industry itself: its promissory note that never delivers, its illusory compensation, its perpetual confirmation of frustration. “It’s just the radio”: one hell of an indictment of the commercial universe it was Richard and Karen Carpenter’s every ambition to enter. Presence of guitar is here absence of star, ironic commentary indeed on what I’ve noted about the withholding quality of Karen’s voice, to say nothing of her gruesome disappearing act. The song appears to work like this: girl falls in love with guitar superstar, and they have a brief moment in the flesh; she later hears him on the box, which makes her feel even more abandoned and wanting than she already did; she longs for his return so that she can hear him “play [his] sad guitar” in person once more. One big culture-industry circle, the outcome of which is frustration and even a desire for further sadness, which Adorno argues was guaranteed to happen in the first place.21 And as for one’s demeanor in the face of that frustration and sadness? “The pathos of composure justifies the world which makes it necessary” (Dialectic, 151).
But there’s more. A dialectic of the live and the commercially reproduced here structures the responses of the singer, who is also a listener like us (in serial regress, we listen to her as she listens to the guitarist; her experience is a stand-in for ours). The live is itself, of course, commercially mediated; otherwise the guitarist wouldn’t be a superstar. But when his sounds take to the airwaves, an evacuation—of presence, of flesh—occurs. This is in the nature of radio, as Allen Weiss has written, this is how it works: “Recording and radio—through a sort of sympathetic magic—entail a theft of the voice and a disappearance of the body, a radical accentuation of the mind/body split, with its concomitant anguish.” The crush that the radio fosters is by definition unrequited: that is what the song says. Some understanding of this on the singer’s part may be why she desires the superstar to come back and play his guitar for her—he’s less a person now than a sound. If, as Weiss argues, “recording produces an exteriorization and transformation of the voice, a sort of dispossession of the self,” we can observe here not only the guitarist’s but also the singer’s dissolution into sound, the flat magic of lyrical repetition in her multiply articulated desire, as in some fort-da game of the soul, that the superstar come back again, the very word again repeatedly punctuating the insistence of desire until articulation fails: “Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, baby.” The attempt to cling to an absence by such means only ensures the fate of all such radio-produced evacuations: “Radio-phonic airspace is a necropolis riddled with dead voices, the voices of the dead, and dead air—all cut off from their originary bodies, all now transmitted to the outer international and cosmic airwaves only in order to reenter our inner ears.”22
Meanwhile, a similar decomposition-by-culture-industry occurs in the song “Yesterday Once More.” As the early ’70s reclamation of 1950s Americana—think American Graffiti and Happy Days—kicked in, the Carpenters produced a song (this one by Richard Carpenter and John Bettis) that addressed this nostalgia with striking self-consciousness: “When I was young / I’d listen to the radio / Waitin’ for my favorite songs / … / How I wondered where they’d gone / But they’re back again / Just like a long lost friend / All the songs I loved so well. / … / Just like before / It’s yesterday once more.”23 Once again the substitution of sound for “friend” via the radio. And, here again, this time in the nostalgic embrace of oldies (or their re-creation in current music), the industrial production of sound establishes a closed circuitry of repetition—of the past, of former feelings, of period musical refrains themselves (so commercially familiar that the singer can short-hand them with a “sha-la-la-la”)—summed up in the title’s “once more.” Not least, the singer’s allegedly happier times are marked by the tears of musically induced heartbreak. Culture-industry seriality: all is unchanging, and invariably downcast, in the radio’s orbit. I am arguing that the Carpenters’ music depends on a soundscape of structured disappointment and disillusion, but also that this soundscape offers them an occasion to reflect on and willfully perpetuate that disillusion. As succeeding lines of “Yesterday Once More” have it: “Lookin’ back on how it was / in years gone by / and the good times that I had / makes today seem rather sad / So much has changed.”
The self-annihilation that the Carpenters, particularly Karen, enacted by way of radiophony is eerily evoked in such songs. In retrospect it is as though they lived the sublating maxim expressed in one of their titles, that “All You Get from Love Is a Love Song.” Yet it must be said that the Carpenters’ intended response to an administered world they espied even in their own music was homeopathic—a striving for perfection and extreme exertions of studio (and stage) control; I think you can hear it (and its essentially negative outcome) in the music. Sound quality was prized so far above performance aura that the Carpenters’ stage show (until they made drastic changes to it in 1976) was widely considered a dud.24 (Check them out on YouTube: Richard sits inertly at the keyboard; Karen sighs into the mike like a willow in a mild breeze.) The word perfection peppers the accounts of their studio methods and output. A revealing 1971 article captures their compulsive meticulousness:
What the Downey pair will do tonight is put the finishing touches to [the song “Hurting Each Other”], adding things none but the best-trained ears will even hear. But Richard hears, and Karen hears, and they are perfectionists…. To the average listener the song was already complete, and even those of us watching and listening were unable to perceive why the Carpenters would suddenly stop, say “no, that’s not right,” and start over again…. With a technician standing by, the Carpenters entered the sound booth and the 16-track tape containing their latest release was started. It will sound like 12 to 15 voices on the radio Friday, and all of them are Richard’s and Karen’s.25
The nonchalance of the Carpenters’ music is belied by a straitjacketed production ethic that undermines the desired effect; it sounds manufactured, airless, the swelling vocals less like rock ‘n’ roll background singers than the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which, come to think of it, may not have been far from the desired effect.
The article from which I just quoted was aptly called “Can’t We Stop?” and it rightly suggests the out-of-control, compulsive quality of perfection’s lure for the Carpenters. Again, this has its dialectical counterpart in the Carpenter family unit and the destructions it wrought or for which it provided the scene. For whatever combination of reasons, that family was an impacted, armored horror show in the guise of suburban rectitude (but aren’t we all?). Allow me just to telegraph the dimensions of the Carpenter family lockdown. Agnes Carpenter ruled the household with more vigor than warmth. The family ethos dictated that Karen and Richard live at home with their parents—not only when they first became stars at nineteen and twenty-three, respectively, but also for many years after. When they did move out, Karen and Richard bought a house and lived together. Even then, one tiptoed around Agnes’s dictates. Richard complained bitterly for years that Karen had adopted Agnes’s mother-function, policing in particular his romantic life (she broke up more than one of his relationships).26 The aura of incest that hung over the group was conveyed pictorially on album covers, on stage in the hand-holding they indulged at certain moments during their shows, and musically in the marriage-minded “We’ve Only Just Begun,” which of course they sing with, if not exactly to, each other. (As Richard put it in 1988, “I called her K.C., and she called me R.C. It seems as if we did everything together. We loved cars and went bowling and listened to Spike Jones, Nat King Cole and Elvis, among many others. More than brother and sister, we were best friends.”)27 After Karen’s death, and only after it, Richard got married—to his cousin Mary. Both siblings appear to have had obsessive-compulsive disorder, and both became drug addicts, though in Karen’s case the consequences were deadly. One might say they responded in kind to an administered world, and it killed them.28
In 1979 Richard successfully kicked an addiction to Quaaludes in a Topeka, Kansas, rehab facility; Karen for many years took as many as one hundred Dulcolax laxative pills a day, together with syrup of Ipecac and thyroid medicine to speed up her metabolism. Later in her short life this five-foot-four-inch woman fluctuated between 106 and 77 pounds; her heart was so stressed by this regime that when in early 1983, after extensive psychiatric treatment, she managed to gain a considerable amount of weight, she suffered a fatal heart attack. The point of all this for me is not the usual Hollywood Babylon fable. When she wasn’t in the bathroom, Karen obsessed over her needlepoint, and Richard mostly washed his cars. Rather, Karen met the culture industry on its own terms and lost. Operating at the intersection of show-biz spectacle and her mother’s severe strictures on female power and autonomy, she strove to eliminate imperfection until there was no life left. Internalizing the business’s murderous pressure on the female image, K.C. tore at herself to preserve an imagined innocence that amounted only to self-negation. Her fleeting romantic relationships were invariably unsatisfying, and her only marriage was abortive. Quite a good drummer as well as singer, she was implored by Richard to abandon the drums, crimping her musicianship and putting her out front, where her paralyzing self-consciousness was only redoubled. She made every attempt not to grow up, surrounding herself with her beloved stuffed animals and Disney paraphernalia. When, with Richard in rehab, she attempted a solo record with famed producer Phil Ramone (veteran of recordings with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and scores of others), she did try on a more embodied, adult image, with songs like “Remember When Lovin’ Took All Night” and “My Body Keeps Changing My Mind.” The result was so ridiculously unconvincing that A&M refused to release it—yet one more moment of negation and waste that amounted, if only unconsciously, to an immanent critique of the industry norms the Carpenters had so embraced.
Enter Sonic Youth, whose “Tunic (Song for Karen),” released seven years after the singer’s death, acutely renders the culture-industry death drive I have tried to capture in this essay. After a drilling, discordant opening, we find Karen in heaven, reflecting on celebrity, selfhood, music, body image, and—Agnes, her mother: “Dreaming, dreaming of a girl like me / Hey what are you waiting for—feeding, feeding me / I feel like I’m disappearing—getting smaller every day / But I look in the mirror—and I’m bigger in every way // She said: / You aren’t never going anywhere / You aren’t never going anywhere / I ain’t never going anywhere / I ain’t never going anywhere.”29 Fed on Hollywood dreams, Karen, as they say in the business, “blew up”—got as big as stars came in the 1970s. This, as “Tunic” rightly suggests, produced a series of self-alienations. It made it impossible for her to have a healthy relation to her size. The body that disappeared in radiophony and in commercial spectacle was also always outsized and therefore a problem in the flesh. At the same time, the song speculates, whether because of anorexia or fame, the singer felt dwarfed (“smaller every day”), a feeling contradicted by the mirror, which doesn’t so much return the singer to her “self” as invert its image. And these dissociations are founded on the installation of Agnes in Karen’s head as internal admonitor.
The only way out of this, the song asserts, is posthumous. “I’m in heaven now,” Karen says, “I can see you Richard / Goodbye Hollywood, Goodbye Downey”; and she seems happy with “all [her] brand new friends,” among them “Janis” (Joplin), “Dennis” (Wilson, the just-deceased Beach Boy, most likely—an inspired choice since he too was a drummer), and, inevitably, “Elvis.” Karen’s ambition (“dreaming, dreaming”) has taken her to the ultimate firmament. “Hey Mom! Look, I’m up here—I finally made it / I’m playing the drums again too.” Looking down from the house band of heaven: not a bad fantasy of omniscient restoration, complete with drum set. The result is a version of the Carpenters’ “Top of the World,” with K.C. literally “lookin’ down on creation.” Where in that song it was love that had lifted her, here it is death. Convincing first-person testimony of anorexia nervosa reveals precisely this: a withholding that delivers plenitude: “Anorexia nervosa isn’t an attempt to make yourself suffer; it’s an attempt, from a postlapsarian vantage point, to recapture Eden by revealing it; with pain you feel, with shivering cold, warmth becomes real and wonderful again. Food becomes delicious and gratifying…. It isn’t that I wanted to be a child again. It’s that I wanted to feel the way I felt when I was a child in this asocial life, centered on my home.”30 This is indeed, as Adorno would have it, contemplating things from the standpoint of redemption. It draws on the tradition Joan Jacobs Brumberg describes as “anorexia mirabilis,” which descends from the examples of fasting saints, though, as Gillian Brown observes, it is also taken with the Romantic imperative of self-expansion.31 Brown’s work directs us to the contradictory relations between consciousness, self-determination, and subjection to be found in the case of Karen Carpenter. The anorectic refusal of food amounts to a paradoxical attempt at self-assertion and self-maintenance; as Brown has it, “the anorectic projects a self that expands through its material reduction.”32 The assumption of power and control is produced by the anorectic as a disappearance; mastery takes the form of self-subjection, for as long as it lasts.33 Thus is “alienation absolutely identical with self-possession,”34 which, I have argued, is the Carpenters’ distaff contribution to a critique of the culture industry. In this radical form of self-proprietorship—dispossession itself—is a kind of antihumanism that shines in every note the Carpenters put on record.
This is, finally, the “health unto death” of which Adorno acidly wrote in Minima Moralia. Karen Carpenter withdrew from feeding (and thus the mother) and musical coimplication (and her brother) into self-possession in extremis—slow starvation and a bad solo record. It may be that these were among the “libidinal achievements” Adorno speaks of as being demanded of an “individual behaving as healthy in body and mind,” which can be performed “only at the cost of the profoundest mutilation.”
The regular guy, the popular girl have to repress not only their desires and insights but even the symptoms that in bourgeois times resulted from repression. Just as the old injustice is not changed by a lavish display of light, air and hygiene, but is in fact concealed by the gleaming transparency of rationalized big business, the inner health of our time has been secured by blocking flight into illness without in the slightest altering its etiology. The dark closets have been abolished as a troublesome waste of space and incorporated in the bathroom. What psychoanalysis suspected, before it became itself a part of hygiene, has been confirmed. The brightest rooms are the secret domain of feces.35
Not long before Karen died, the regular guy and the popular girl managed to release (in June 1981) their all-too-fittingly-titled comeback album Made in America. It was too little too late: there was nothing left to eat but the menu, and Karen found only in heaven the only perfection there is.
Notes
1. Theodor Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938), in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Urizen, 1978), 270–99.
2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972 [1947]), 32–37. Hereafter cited in the text as Dialectic.
3. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (1951; London: Verso, 1974).
4. Ray Coleman, The Carpenters: The Untold Story; An Authorized Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 163. See also Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 230–31.
5. Coleman, The Carpenters, 143,
6. Joseph Lanza, “‘Beautiful Music’: The Rise of Easy-Listening FM,” in Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, eds., The Popular Music Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 161; see also Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York: Picador, 1994), 167–82.
7. “Chuck didn’t play it that way at first, but I worked with him and he nailed it,” said Richard. “A lot of people thought it was Herb—Bacharach thought so, too. But it’s the way Findley is playing it.” Quoted in Daniel Levitin, “Pop Charts: How Richard Carpenter’s Lush Arrangements Turned Hit Songs Into Pop Classics” (1995), in Randy Schmidt, ed., Yesterday Once More: Memories of the Carpenters and Their Music (Cranberry Township, PA: Tiny Ripple, 2000), 219; originally published in Electronic Musician.
8. Robert Christgau, Rock Albums of the ’70s: A Critical Guide (New York: Da Capo, 1981), 75.
9. Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice” (1972), in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 183.
10. David Jenemann, Adorno in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 1; see also 45, 53–54. For an excellent account of Adorno in Los Angeles, see Nico Israel, “Damage Control: Adorno, Los Angeles, and the Dislocation of Culture,” Yale Journal of Criticism 10, no. 1 (1997): 85–113.
11. Eric Lott, “The Aesthetic Ante: Pleasure, Pop Culture, and the Middle Passage,” Callaloo 17, no.2 (1994): 546, 547.
12. Theodor W. Adorno, with the assistance of George Simpson, “On Popular Music” (1941), in Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin, eds., On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (New York: Pantheon, 1990), 310.
13. E.g., Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 306; Dialectic, 136.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981 [1967]), 32.
15. Louis Althusser, “On Levi-Strauss” (1966), in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. Francois Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 26–27.
16. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 32.
17. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 307.
18. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); see also Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–16, 69–104.
19. Carey McWilliams, “Watts: The Forgotten Slum,” Nation, August 30, 1965, quoted in Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 213.
20. Leon Russell and Bonnie Bramlett, “Superstar” (Embassy Music/Cherry River Music, 1971).
21. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 313–14.
22. Allen S. Weiss, Phantasmic Radio (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 32, 32, 79. See also, more generally, Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
23. Richard Carpenter and John Bettis, “Yesterday Once More” (Almo Music/Hammer and Nails Music, 1973).
24. For an account of the absurdity of those changes, see Ray Coleman’s 1976 Melody Maker article, “Carpenters uber alles!” in Schmidt, Yesterday Once More, 137–43.
25. Dan Armstrong, “Can’t We Stop? Putting the Finishing Touches on a Carpenters Record” (1971), in Schmidt, Yesterday Once More, 57.
26. See, for example, the revealing comments in Coleman, “Carpenters uber alles!” in Schmidt, Yesterday Once More, 140–41.
27. Richard Carpenter, “Karen Was Wasting Away … I Had a Drug Problem … and We Couldn’t Help Each Other,” TV Guide (1988), in Schmidt, Yesterday Once More, 193.
28. These more or less standard biographical details come from Coleman, The Carpenters, the Richard Carpenter–authorized biography.
29. Sonic Youth, “Tunic (Song for Karen)” (Savage Conquest Music, ASCAP, 1990).
30. “Norma,” quoted in Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 71.
31. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 44–45, 47–48; Gillian Brown, “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 1 (1991): 190. Brown’s essay is brilliantly useful in the present context; for Brumberg’s interesting remarks on Karen Carpenter, whose illness brought major public attention to anorexia, see Fasting Girls, 17–18.
32. Brown, “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” 190.
33. See also, in this connection, Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
34. Brown, “Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism,” 196.
35. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 58, 58, 58–59.