Skinny blues: Karen Carpenter, anorexia nervosa and popular music

George Mckay

doi:10.1017/s026114301700054x

Abstract

AbstractThis article discusses an extraordinary body in popular music, that belonging to the person with anorexia which is also usually a gendered body – female – and that of the singer or frontperson. I explore the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, which is more than simply looking at constructions of anorexia in pop. It involves contextually thinking about the (medical) history and the critical reception and representation, the place of anorexia across the creative industries more widely, and a particular moment when pop played a role in the public awareness of anorexia. Following such context the article looks in more detail at a small number of popular music artists who had experience of anorexia, their stage and media presentations (of it), and how they did or apparently did not explore their experience of it in their own work and public appearances. This close discussion is framed within thinking about the popular music industry's capacity for carelessness, its schedule of pressure and practice of destruction on its own stars, particularly in this instance its female artists. This is an article about a condition and an industry. At its heart is the American singer and drummer Karen Carpenter (1950–1983), a major international pop star in the 1970s, in the Carpenters duo with her brother Richard; the other figures discussed are Scottish child pop star Lena Zavaroni (1963–1999), and the Welsh rock lyricist, stylist and erstwhile guitarist of the Manic Street Preachers, Richey Edwards (1967–1995 missing/2008 officially presumed dead).

Highlights

We might locate that colloquial inauguration of anorexia on a Las Vegas nightclub stage in the fall of 1975, when the popular musician Karen Carpenter collapsed while singing ‘Top of the world’; or on the morning of 5 February 1983, when news [broke] of Carpenter’s death from a ‘starvation diet’.... [I]n the 1970s and 1980s [anorexia] ... became a vernacular, an everyday word, an idiom
I explore the relation between the anorexic body and popular music, which is more than looking at constructions of anorexia in pop
Following such context I will look in more detail at a small number of popular music artists who had experience of anorexia, their stage and media presentations, and how they did or apparently did not explore their experience of it in their own work and public appearances

Summary

Introduction

We might locate that colloquial inauguration of anorexia on a Las Vegas nightclub stage in the fall of 1975, when the popular musician Karen Carpenter collapsed while singing ‘Top of the world’; or on the morning of 5 February 1983, when news [broke] of Carpenter’s death from a ‘starvation diet’.... [I]n the 1970s and 1980s [anorexia] ... became a vernacular, an everyday word, an idiom. These musical questions are centred on Karen Carpenter, both to reflect on her experiences of anorexia and to contribute further to the critical interrogation of how pop operates, especially for its female artists.

Results

Conclusion