Corny New Age Music

Reviving this thread because I've been enjoying this whole channel, and this video in particular just nails exactly why I (and just about every music friend I had) absolutely hated this stuff as kids in the 90s and also why I love it now as a perfect accidental expression of the dystopian present we live in.

I used to ask around about "dystopian new age music" on line back in the mid 2000s and people had no clue what I was talking about, but I think people are finally starting to get it the past few years. 

The golden age of New Age and World Music was as grim as anything I've ever heard. Back in high school in the mid 90s (I am old) at band practice we used to make bean dip and talk about how people could cope with life in a late-stage Capitalist society (not the term we used but it's what we were talking about) now that the marketing industry had fully appropriated irony, and at the time we couldn't imagine how it would be possible, because online gaming didn't exist yet.

Listening to new age/world music today gives me very much the same feeling I used to get listening to death metal and grindcore and goregrind and the like when I was 12.

i have amassed a very fine collection of new age tapes from local thrift shops over the years and enjoy the ahit out of them with no sense of irony. i think the anachrony of the music and its list context relaxes me, pulls me out of the constant novelty-seeking aspect of listening to contemporary music. also the sense of care and good intent that i feel the artists embedded in the music pleases me.

  On 6/30/2015 at 4:10 AM, MadnessR said:

Just listen to Ray Lynch's Deep Breakfast.  David Lanz's Christofori's Dream is great too!  Cheesy and beautiful.  I love all these songs.

I love Deep Breakfast, that's one of the first things that made me actually start paying some attention to it all the way back in the early 90s as a kid.

Animal Collective ripped it off hard for My Girls, too (although to be fair they had a Juno and if you have a Juno sooner or later you're going to be ripping off Enya or Ray Lynch, that's half the reason to even get/want a Juno).

But yeah, don't take my earlier post to mean I only enjoy this stuff ironically, I like plenty of things while recognizing their inherent ridiculousness but I've never, ever liked anything ironically.  How is that even possible?

I just find new age music has always elicited this sense of loss and hopelessness, but in a weirdly comforting way.   It always sounds like it's trying to get back something you've lost that never actually existed to begin with, and it's doubly poignant because the people making it usually don't seem to know it never existed.

Speaking of Junos, this is completely obvious but always bears repeating:

Maybe it's just the quality of the video but this hits the same spots for me as something like Xasthur or even Whitehouse, with the added bonus of the fanbase not being full of neonazis.

god shpongle is so bad

Saw Laaraji a few weeks ago, he put out an album with Dallas Acid recently.

  On 10/16/2018 at 9:37 PM, RSP said:

Reviving this thread because I've been enjoying this whole channel, and this video in particular just nails exactly why I (and just about every music friend I had) absolutely hated this stuff as kids in the 90s and also why I love it now as a perfect accidental expression of the dystopian present we live in.

 

 

Holy shit, we talked about this in a course I took back in 2006/2007 or so at UT. The class covered pop music around the world but we spent a few classes specifically talking about pitfalls and moral complications when it came to the emergence of the "world music" fad in the 80s and 90s. He also talked about Paul Simon's Graceland as a inverse to all of these examples of appropriation and misguided aesthetics, at least in intentions. He infused South African music styles in a tasteful way, elevated collaborators Ladysmith Black Mamboza into financial success overseas that they were blocked from having in their own country at the time. It had a very complicated and tense context surrounding it from multiple angles: for example a white Afrikaner music reviewer praised him for "cleaning up" the sound on a pennywhistle used on the album, ascribing a racist bent by characterizing studio mixing into some false claim that Simon was making black migrant street music "less black" Ironically it was considered more controversial at the time because he recorded in South Africa at the height of apartheid but in terms of musical execution it was sincere and respectful. It was quite forward thinking, especially for 1986.

I have this whole album! Maybe it's not his best but I bet y'all would like him.

Whole album here:

He's been at it quite a while! Here's his first album, from 1975.

NOT CORNY

  On 10/21/2022 at 12:59 PM, valsprismatico said:

NOT CORNY

there you go

Truth be told, not all of Halpern's stuff is corny. But as this is the New Age thread I felt obliged to share the guy who is one of the early pioneers of the stuff