"Record stores have whole sections devoted to the chant"
About this Quote
A clergyman noticing that record stores have whole sections devoted to chant is less a quaint observation than a cultural weather report: what used to live inside stone walls and strict liturgy has been repackaged into retail categories, alphabetized and sold alongside everything else. Morris is registering a shift in ownership. Chant, in his world, isn’t just a sound; it’s a discipline, a technology of reverence, a form of communal timekeeping. Put it on a shelf and it becomes an aesthetic option.
The line’s quiet sting is in “devoted.” That word belongs to worship, but here it’s reassigned to commerce. The store performs a parody of piety: sections, rituals of browsing, the promise that transcendence is one purchase away. Morris doesn’t have to denounce it outright; he lets the sentence do the work by forcing two moral economies into the same frame.
Context matters because Morris (1833-1894) sits in the long 19th-century churn of industrial capitalism and religious reorganization, when churches were contending with mass production, mass literacy, and a public newly trained to consume culture as product. Even without literal record stores in his lifetime, the idea tracks with a Victorian anxiety: sacred forms migrating into popular circulation, where meaning thins and portability becomes the point.
Subtextually, it’s also a backhanded admission of chant’s power. People don’t buy what doesn’t work. The marketplace, accidentally, becomes evidence of hunger for the very atmosphere the church claims to provide - just without the doctrine, the authority, or the demand.
The line’s quiet sting is in “devoted.” That word belongs to worship, but here it’s reassigned to commerce. The store performs a parody of piety: sections, rituals of browsing, the promise that transcendence is one purchase away. Morris doesn’t have to denounce it outright; he lets the sentence do the work by forcing two moral economies into the same frame.
Context matters because Morris (1833-1894) sits in the long 19th-century churn of industrial capitalism and religious reorganization, when churches were contending with mass production, mass literacy, and a public newly trained to consume culture as product. Even without literal record stores in his lifetime, the idea tracks with a Victorian anxiety: sacred forms migrating into popular circulation, where meaning thins and portability becomes the point.
Subtextually, it’s also a backhanded admission of chant’s power. People don’t buy what doesn’t work. The marketplace, accidentally, becomes evidence of hunger for the very atmosphere the church claims to provide - just without the doctrine, the authority, or the demand.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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