The gimlet eye - Gregorian chants and other fads

National Review, August 12, 1996 by John Bloom

### BRIGGS, JOE BOB

MAYBE you've been in a bookstore or a cappuccino shop lately and heard a Catholic religious service going on through the Muzak. This is not a mistake. They're playing this stuff in singles bars.

Gregorian chants are hip.

It took 1,400 years for it to happen, but somebody decided, "Hey, man, these liturgical riffs are bad." And so people use em for therapy, for background music at cocktail parties, for art-gallery openings, for the music in the theater before the play starts, and I'm not gonna say this is one of the strangest trends of the last 400 years, but . . .

It's weird. You got these monks in black hoods chanting, as part of the Catholic Mass, and you got hipsters in black leather pants sitting around Beverly Hills restaurants going, "Yeah, man, I dig Vespers and Compline, but Matins is a downer. Who gets up that early anyway?"

You've probly even got leisure-suited salesmen in Omaha hanging out at the Holiday Inn, hitting on women with, "Hey, gorgeous, wanna come up to my room and listen to the Gloria? No? Well, listen, I don't usually do this on the first date, but I've also got the Kyrie. Not the boring one from the seventh century, either. It's the one they started doing in the eleventh century, with all the wild high notes."

How does something like this get started?

Do record-company executives have meetings where they say, "Well, we've got two more Prince albums this year. Tony Bennett is selling. That Whitney Houston single went through the roof. But, now that Cobain is dead, I've been thinking we need something different. You know this dude St. Gregory? He was a singin pope. Dig the bass line on this. It's called Offertory. All his stuff has Black Sabbath - type titles. I think we can move these."

Do people go to all-night dance clubs in Miami and boogie down to the Introit?

Do Gregorian purists only listen to the Alleluia, because it dates to the fourth century and is therefore uncorrupted by the reforms of Charlemagne?

Do people realize that Gregorian chants have been available in Catholic bookstores since the beginning of recorded music about, uh, ninety years ago?

Do you realize Benedicamus Domino could get a bullet in Billboard any day now?

This country is getting way too strange for me. Not only are we turning the Lord's Prayer into corporate mood music, but we're doing the same thing with painting and sculpture. I get these catalogues all the time from big-deal art museums, like the Metropolitan in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston -- and they wanna sell me art to either wear on my body or put on top of my TV set.

And these are not small catalogues. These are, like, nine-thousand-item selections.

How about a Greek Horse Pin, adapted from a bronze horse found at Olympia in 750 B.C.? You can pin one to your lapel for 28 bucks.

In other words, if you go to the museum, and find the "Classical Bronzes from Thessaly" department, you'll see a bronze horse from 750 B.C. But if you don't have time to go to the museum, you can get a cheap miniature copy to wear to the office.

What am I missing here?

Should I feel left out because I don't have a cat-food bowl with Winslow Homer watercolors on it?

Am I hopelessly unhip because I don't have a tie with Egyptian cave paintings on it?

Should I take down the painting of Poker-Playing Dogs over my mantel and put up a gold scarf with Gustav Klimt's The Kiss on it?

And who is Gustav Klimt?

What is wrong with this picture?

You can get anything with High Art on it now. You can get Picasso jockstraps from these people.

What happened to going to the museum with your third-grade teacher, looking at the art, listening to the lady with orthopedic shoes explain it, then running outside and climbing on the steel modern-art thingy?

Now we would be expected to stop in the gift shop and buy an ashtray for Dad in the shape of the steel modern-art thingy.

Is this supposed to make Dad feel good?

I think not.

Listen up.

I don't want the Mona Lisa on my shirt, my hat, my butt, or the soles of my shoes.

I want the Mona Lisa hangin on the wall where it belongs.

THE last thing we need is more junk to throw in a drawer where you forget about it until you move, and then you go, "Oh, look! I forgot all about this! My Rembrandt!"

Isn't there something a little, uh, junky about all this?

Aren't these supposed to be art museums?

As the lady in orthopedic shoes used to say, "Don't we all want to treat the museum with respect?"

Leave the catalogues to Spencer Gifts, people. I thank you, and the spirit of Toulouse-Lautrec thanks you.

And as for St. Gregory's singing monks, let's not turn em into posthumous Unitarians, how bout it? I know it sounds great in the tanning bed and everything, but so does Parliament Funkadelic. If we're gonna sing about God, let's make sure it's the same God we believe in.