Look Can We Just Be Done With This Already

Okay I'm not going to name names. But I've complained about this before, and still you persist: why do people think that their pose of being bored by the great composers is so very interesting to the rest of us? It's bad enough when you can at least say, "I alone am the little boy who sees that the emperor has got no clothes on!" in reference to some little-noticed (or, in most cases, imagined) blemishes in the corpus of some universally revered titan of music. Great, fine, you're a contrarian, you know more than the rest of us, congrats and welcome to your senior year of high school. But the worst is the people who think it's so fascinating to take down a composer with a diss that is, itself, a total cliché. NEWS FLASH: TCHAIKOVSKY'S MUSIC IS OFTEN SENTIMENTAL AND/OR DAINTY. Yeah, so? That doesn't mean that his music it can't also be profoundly rewarding. MENDELSSOHN'S MUSIC IS SUPERFICIAL. Okay first of all not only is that untrue, not only didn't you make it up, but that was made up by some really creepy people with a really big ax (labeled "JEW") to grind. Are you really trying to tell me that Evgeny Onegin is not worth my time? Are you seriously trying to come out hard against the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto? And if we cannot grow up here, people, it would be great if we could at least stop borrowing our talking points from the Nazis. A disproportionate number of the composers it seems so fashionable to dismiss are Jewish or Slavic or otherwise less-than-sufficiently Nordic, or they are being slammed for allowing themselves to be perceived as effeminate. Okay, that's not cool or rebellious or anti-establishment. That's schoolyard-style bullying. Other composers dissed in actual print lately: Handel. Saint-Saëns. I guess Handel I can understand, if you're in England, where they like to pretend he's English and cannot get enough of him, although you are still just wrong. (I hope my Handel-h8in' roommate is reading this and laughing.) But Saint-Saëns? Are you really trying to discourage performances of Saint-Saëns? Saint-Saëns, considering the breadth of his body of work, is an absurdly under-performed composer. Didn't he write like thirteen operas? Have you heard even three of them in your life? I fail to see the point of sniping at that poor dead French faggot. We can do better. Let's show a little brains and a little courage and save our ammunition for the really stupid, ugly music all around us.