About this item
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.
About the Author
Karen Tongson is a Filipino-American cultural critic, writer and queer studies scholar. She is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011) , and Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019) . Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, NPR, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in the academic journals Public Culture, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among other public and scholarly venues. She has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory (Duke University Press) and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy (NYU Press) .Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published twenty titles. You can also hear Karen talk about pop culture, the arts and entertainment on the weekly Pop Rocket Podcast hosted by comedian Guy Branum. She is Associate Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies & Ethnicity at USC. She joined the faculty in fall 2005 after receiving her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to USC, Tongson held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego, and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine. Born in Manila, Philippines to one of the nation's founding families of Latin jazz--the Katindig clan--Karen immigrated to the U.S in the early 1980s and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. She lives in Los Angeles and is married to media scholar and TV columnist, Sarah Kessler. They have two cats, Lily and Corky.
