Richard Carpenters Influence On American Pop Culture

Popular music category, or often known as pop music category, is one of the most crucial and essential categories in every music awards from the Grammy Awards in the US to the Brit Awards in the UK and the Mnet Asian Music Awards annually takes place in Asia. Evidently, pop music around the world has strongly been influenced by the American pop music culture because of its long and well-known music history, along with the rapid economically development and cultural spread of the US for, at least, the last two centuries. It has shaped many other pop music cultures so that we have such a comparable yet still a unique collection of pop music around the world today. The influence of American pop music towards other regions nowadays happen as

Richard Carpenter was born on October 15, 1946 and Karen Carpenter was born on March 2, 1950 to Harold Bertram Carpenter and Agnes Tatum in New Haven, Connecticut (Decker 47; Merron 518). At a young age as early as 3 years old, Richard could “remember listening to his father’s 78s” and started to develop his interest in music under the influence of his father’s occupation at a container corporations, which was Richard’s very first access to music from the classical to the big band music (Carpenters Biography 2005, Richard and Karen Carpenter). His great music taste was affected by a lot of musicians in the American music history. For example, “Guy Mitchell, Perry Como, Patti Page and Nat King Cole were particular favorites, as were guitarist Les Paul and his wife Mary Ford, and he also enjoyed both the Dixieland jazz of Red Nichols and the comedy of Spike Jones and his City Slickers.” (Carpenters Biography 2005, Richard and Karen

After the try-out, Karen’s parents signed a contract for her with the label and Magic Lamp released two singles which were “Looking For Love” and “I’ll Be Yours”, written by Richard and performed by Karen (Carpenters Biography 2005, Richard and Karen Carpenter). According to the Carpenters Biography 2005, the two records were a good start for Karen in recognizing and forming her path for singing as well as Richard’s talent in producing music; however, due to the lack of “machinery for distribution and promotion” of the Magic Lamp, the contract did not work out and the label crashed after a