Soothing music: for those in a coma.

Recently, I've written in this space about Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Clapton. At the suggestion of my editors, I headed for the local CD Warehouse to learn--and to report to you--on what New Age music is all about.

Here's the report: Nada. Nichts. Rien. Nothing. As Garry Trudeau paraphrased it some years ago, air pudding, man. New Age music, what can I tell you, makes elevator-piped-in sound get-down funky. Almost.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

"New Age," in case you've been in a sensory deprivation chamber since Reagan's first term, is our own, distinctly American and distinctly late-twentieth-century millennial myth. A loose amalgam--actually, a kind of spiritual pousse-cafe--of primordial nature-religion, nonsectarian pentecostalism, and California Marin-County-I'm-okay-you're-okay wussitude. Its central tenet, such as it is, is that the time is at hand when all people shall be happily loving brothers and sisters, all conflicts resolved, and all stress banished under the benevolent sign of Aquarius, which our planet entered sometime in the eighties. And, oh yeah: there's no Death. Just merging into the universal Oneness of Oneness and maybe coming back as a higher life form (me, I'm coming back as a beagle).

Now as you can imagine, this theology--theology Lite, actually--doesn't exactly make it in South Central L.A. or Bedford-Stuyvesant or Cabrini Green. It's apocalypse for the well-heeled or for those who have the option to drop out of the well-heeled. One of my New Age buddies, who hangs out around the Santa Barbara campus, is named--says so on his driver's license--Jesus Christ. He believes in peace and brotherhood and the goodness of all things and he does no real harm, but then neither does Velveeta Cheese. One of the chief theoreticians of New Age thought--if the concept, "theory," even applies here--is the blissed-out priest Matthew Fox. In The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Fox writes that "the sacramental consciousness of panentheism develops into a transparent and diaphanous consciousness wherein we can see events and beings as divine."

Say what? My teacher and ghostly father Harold Bloom, in The American Religion, wonderfully observes that if you substitute the word "juice" for "consciousness" and "oranges" for "divine" in that sentence, it makes quite as much sense. Perhaps, alas, the ultimate Dictionnaire philosophique entry for New Age is "A metaphysics that Shirley MacLaine can dig."

One reason I called New Age distinctly American and contemporary is that it's as much a marketing concept as it is a concept concept. New Age--the crystals, the music, the zodiac-sign paintings--sells. It sells to the affluent, the spiritually and imaginatively undemourished children of the senescent American Dream, whose epic poem is "The Brady Bunch" and whose ineradicably human yearning for the holy is thwarted by the irresistibly contemporary seduction of the suburban. It's like Zima: a nondrink drink, a user-friendly sublime, which is no damn sublime at all.

But you want to hear about the music. Just as New Age thought has, really, no thought, so New Age music is not really a music. (Think about that glorious product, "Real Turkey Pastrami.") When I told you that its final significance was Nichts, I didn't mean the stuff was bad. There is no bad music. (I even, to the bemusement of my orthodox pals, have a couple of Klezmer Cds.) 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. 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.

Take Kenny G., the soprano saxophone player whom Bill Clinton, predictably and regrettably, likes. "Songbird" is his one, so far, top-forty hit, and it's all major chords and doodle-doodle pretty elaborations on a simple, virtually children's-song theme. Not that there's anything wrong with children's songs. 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. The thing is, though, that Mozart, Wagner, and Monk built on that, while Kenny just stays and stays there. I listen to the tune and I think, hey, man, I wish I had your chops; and I wish you had John Coltrane's daring--or at least a bit of it.

Take Enya, the darkly beautiful Irish singer-composer-lyricist-producer whose breakaway 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). New Age music leans heavily toward the Celfic, or the pseudo-celtic: it has, don't you know, the aura of the aboriginal. (If I had a dollar for every New Age disc with a Stonehenge-inspired cover, bills would be paid up till next November.)

Or take "Temple of Venus," which my friend at the CD outlet tells me is a steady seller. No personnel or instrumentation are listed, but it's got to be a synthesizer doing sixty minutes of vaguely Indian-style pulse music. 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. 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."

Say what? This out-oranges even the redoubtable Father Fox.

In fact, most of the stuff I've listened to vibrates among three recognizable musical traditions. First, Celtic and American Bluegrass folk music, with sparse instrumentation and simple, hard-to-get-out-of-your-head melodies. 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). 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. And third, a kind of music that I shall here name, for the first time, pomo-pop. 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. It's music designed not really to be listened to: and now people are buying it to--presumably--listen.

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. There are, as in every venue, some mightily talented folks out there: Yanni, David Tom, and Philip Aaberg come immediately to mind. But on the whole, the music is as finally unsatisfactory as its ideological parent. Compare to it, the serious and challenging minimalism 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.

What is interesting about it is just its large, and growing, share of the market. Why do people listen to this stuff when they could be hearing, say, "Charlie Parker Plays the Cole Porter Songbook"?

I blame Reagan, sort of. 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. It's a seductive and dangerous simplicity: it's morning in America, and if you believe in fairies, clap your hands.