Media
McConnell, Frank
But you want to hear about the music. Just as New Age thought has, really, no thought, so New Age music is not re- ally a music. (Think about that glorious product, "Real Turkey Pastrami.")...
...Add $7 for postage outside the U.S...
...It's a seductive and dangerous simplicity: it's morning in America, and if you believe in fairies, clap your hands...
...I blame Reagan, sort of...
...I meant that it's almost good but, like the philosophy from which it takes its name, hampered by a kind of ferocious obsession with pleasantness...
...Take Enya, the darkly beautiful Irish singer-composer-lyricist-producer whose bmakaway hit was "Oronooko Flow" ("Sail Away"--if you've driven a car with the radio on in the last two years, you've heard it...
...Eros and Sexus are the two sides of the most powerful energy streams, deployed with the purpose of binding two incomplete halves perpetually seeking to be one, and which will be merged into a complete whole...
...The thing is, though, that Mozart, Wagner, and Monk built on that, while Kenny just stays and stays there...
...Not that there's anything wrong with children's songs...
...I even, to the bemusement of my orthodox pals, have a couple of Klezmer CDs...
...In the Spring issue, read: A Special Section on Green Politics • Debates on health care, immigration policy, foreign policy, and single motherhood • Articles on multiculturalism and individualism, the New York elections, associational democracy, equality and difference, memory and the Holocaust, and much more Subscription: [] $22/year ($27.50*) [] $40/two years(S50*) [] Students: $15/year...
...No personnel or instrumentation are listed, but it's got to be a synthesizer doing sixty minutes of vaguely Indian-style pulse music...
...Most of the major themes of Mozart, Wagner, and Thelonius Monk-to name only three gods---could easily be sung by little girls skipping rope on the playground...
...There is no bad music...
...The Utne Reader says, "Politics, economics, and culture come together in every article, giving the entire publication a balance most politicalj ournals lack...
...and I wish you had John Coltrane's daring--or at least a bit of it...
...There are, as in every venue, some mightily talented folks out them: Yanni, David Torn, and Philip Aaberg come immediately to mind...
...Try it for yourself...
...If New Age "thought" is fatally flawed by its resolute refusal to acknowledge a concept of Evil, New Age music is hobbled by its studied--I'd say, neurotic--avoidance of complexity, dissonance, and minor chords...
...Songbird" is his one, so far, top-forty hit, and it's all major chords and doodledoodle pretty elaborations on a simple, virtually children' s-song theme...
...It's music designed not really to be listened to: and now people are buying it to---presumably--listen...
...If you've ever seen an X-rated film then you know that steady, rhythmic, unobtrusive soundtrack that starts just around when Things Begin to Get Heavy...
...New Age music leans heavily toward the Celtic, or the pseudo-Celtic: it has, don't you know, the aura of the aboriginal...
...The only information on the cover is the following: "The separation of the genders as a precondition for the will to unify: the plan of Creation...
...First, Celtic and American Bluegrass folk music, with sparse instrumentation and simple, hard-to-get-out-of-your-head melodies...
...As we approach century's end, and as we still reel from one of the most unprecedented (and unpresidented) eras of cynicism in our history, New Age--the philosophy and the music---offers us the illusion that we haven' t raped the planet, that we're not becoming wretched and soulless technologues, that we are still nice people...
...Take Kenny G., the soprano saxophone player whom Bill Clinton, predictably and regrettably, likes...
...Expiration Date Name Address City/State/ZIP Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Commonweal 6 May 1994:19...
...Or take "Temple of Venus," which my friend at the CD outlet tells me is a steady seller...
...or ours...
...I listen to the tune and I think, hey, man, I wish ! had your chops...
...If this sounds like I'm saying most New Age music is as vapid as the knee-jerk-liberal, vegetarian-benevolent-goofy philosophy from which it takes its name: bingo...
...If I had a dollar for every New Age disc with a Stonehenge-inspired cover, bills would be paid up till next November...
...And third, a kind of music that I shall here name, for the first time, porno-pop...
...Say what...
...This out-oranges even the redoubtable Father Fox...
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...For four decades Dissent has been a strong voice on the democratic left...
...In fact, the brilliant pianist George Winston, whose early-eighties recordings for Windham Hill helped establish both the music and the Windham Hill label, was perceived as a jazz player before the more lucrative New Age moniker was invented...
...But don't take their word for it...
...When I told you that its final significance was Nichts, I didn't mean the stuff was bad...
...FRANK McCONNELL Agree with or dissent from but don't be without it...
...currency...
...Just as New Age thought has, really, no thought, so New Age music is not really a music...
...In fact, most of the stuff I've listened to vibrates among three recognizable musical traditions...
...Compare to it, the serious and challenging minirealism of composers like Philip Glass or John Adams, and you begin to realize its vacuity: it's as ultimately boring as rap, but it's what the suburban parents of the kids who listen to rap are listening to...
...Second, the kind of jazz we used to call "cool" or "West Coast," as in the early Chico Hamilton Quintet, the Dave Brubeck Quartet with Paul Desmond, and the Modern Jazz Quartet (together for thirty years and still perfect...
...Think about that glorious product, "Real Turkey Pastrami...
...Bill me [] VISA ?5 Mastercard Signature Card No...
...Why do people listen to this stuff when they could be hearing, say, "Charlie Parker Plays the Cole Porter Songbook...
...What is interesting about it is just its large, and growing, share of the market...
...But on the whole, the music is as finally unsatisfactory as its ideological parent...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
