JohnFB
She was born to belong to the lines of a song...
They were a fusion band, blending together beautifully all the best of the past with many of the best features of the new music prominent in their own time. If they were "middle of the road" then what was on the left & right of them other than a lot of 3rd rate stuff crashing into the gutter - like a lot of music that came after them. This is reminiscent of what happened in Classical music after Mozart and Beethoven left their immense marks on the music world. It was unlike anything that came before, and nothing could equal it afterwards.But wouldn't the music have as much to do with the image as anything. I would think they were considered middle of the road. And people tended to look with disdain at that kind of music. But even so a lot of people seemed to buy it.
Now, there are 3 main groups of Carpenter reactors: (1) that very small group who, for inexplicable and irrational reasons, actually did disdain their music; (2) a moderate sized group, who out of cowardness, said publicly that they disdained their music - but secretly listened to & loved it, and have since "come out of the closet"; and (3) that very large group who loved their music.
The image "problem" was of their own making, in the sense that they gave it any credence at all, and allowed it to bother them as much as they did or to
any extent at all, instead of just saying "f**k all of that bullsh*t , let's get back in rhe recording studio and make some more great music".
Their career was a very sad case of immense potential unrealized, of a colossal amount of lost opportunity, of genius gone astray. If they had not worried so senselessly and needlessly about something as stupid as image; if they had stayed in the recording studio 90% of the time instead of touring; and if they had recorded everything live and thrown away all of the artificial technical gimmicks that they used to distort and diminish their sound, their history would be unparalleled and untouchable.
They botched their chance at real greatness - as good as they were they never fulfilled their incredible potential - and it's a crying shame, literally.