For baby boomers, it lacked passion and personality to young people, it seemed unbearably timid, slow, and empty, especially in comparison to the vibrant rock, punk, funk, disco, glam, and nascent hip-hop of the day while most serious musicians considered it hollow, pseudo-spiritual drivel: indulgent, incoherent and insincere. Tellingly, few of those who lived through new age music’s ascendance remember it fondly.

It was a time when dropping out of society became less about rebellion than survival. Certain remnants of the alternative-minded counterculture doubled down on the more fringe holistic practices and ideas of the 1960s youthquake: yoga, Eastern medicine, juice cleanses, crystal healing, reincarnation, Atlantis. And hope was sorely needed in the 1970s, as the hippie dream of peace and love decayed ever into violence, decadence, divorce, and corruption. The phrase itself, of course, is old, invoked over centuries by various mystics and spiritual leaders to refer to an impending, ill-defined future era of enlightenment as a means of instilling hope in their congregation. The historical context of new age is important to keep in mind. Beyond the bulging charity bins of glossy Windham Hill LPs and saccharine solo piano cassettes there lies a fascinating strain of hermetic otherworldly music, much of it self-released, which poured forth during this period and now commands significant sums on the second-hand market. In fact, over the years many prominent artists of the movement have rejected association with new age and its trappings, as it’s widely considered to be the domain of quacks and charlatans.Įven so, any utopian-minded subculture is bound to produce intriguing artifacts, and the past decade in particular has seen a widespread renewed appreciation of new age ephemera. Contemporary listeners tend to conflate new age with ambient but their overlap is inconsistent: though much new age music exudes ambient qualities, the reverse is less often the case. New age music remains misunderstood because new age isn’t a style or a sound but a sensibility an exceptionally soupy, psychedelic one, at that.

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