Fire Eduard Hanslick*

OMG, you guys! It's finally happened: someone has invented a Fire Joe Morgan for classical music!!!

Okay, that was probably a very confusing opening paragraph for most of you. Let me explain. A few years back, some baseball fans who make their living as Hollywood screenwriters became so disgusted with the low intelligence level and writing skill of many so-called experts on the game that they launched a blog devoted to tearing down the suppositions of these experts, line by line. The blog's namesake was arguably the greatest second baseman of all time, and is inarguably one of the most consistently nonsensical and pigheaded baseball analysts working today.

Fire Joe Morgan should have been one of the bitterest, boring-est, most unreadable blogs in the universe. Instead, it was utterly hilarious, spawned countless imitators in the sports blogosphere, and turned its creators into the conquering folk heroes of the baseball stat-geek world. Were they mean? Yes. Unfairly nit-picky? Sometimes. But they were also right in almost everything they wrote, and their devoted readership included quite a few of baseball's more forward-thinking analysts.

Sadly, the authors shut the whole enterprise down some time ago, shortly after shedding their anonymity (no surprise that the hilariously cruel Ken Tremendous turned out to be one of the writers behind The Office,) but their fight against nonsense and bad writing stands as some of the most entertaining content on the web.

From the day I discovered FJM, I wished someone would start just such a blog for classical music. So much of what gets written about our industry in respectable publications falls somewhere between speculative and idiotic that it can be downright infuriating. When you read about musicians or actors who claim not to read reviews, it's usually not because they think they're above analysis. It's because a wrongheaded and badly written review makes you want to scream, and it's almost never worth actually screaming about, and there's nothing to be accomplished by the screaming.

There are, of course, plenty of blogs out there offering strong opinions on classical music, and many of them openly disagree with professional critics on a regular basis. But they're not funny. In fact, they're usually the opposite of funny, which is to say strident and preachy, and it was the funny that made FJM such an entertaining and readable site, rather than just another shrieking partisan voice in the online void.

As it turns out, though, not only is there a classical music version of FJM, it's apparently been around for more than two years now! (How it's taken me this long to notice it is beyond me, but I suppose I should be grateful that I didn't find it while Googling myself.) It's called The Detritus Review, it's written (if the FAQ is to be believed) by a couple of grad students majoring in music who've become disgusted with the quality of music writing in the mainstream press, and you guys, it. is. funny.

Please note that I didn't say that it's nice. Or respectful. It is neither of those, and I know some of you get upset when Sarah or I seem disrespectful of some corner of the music universe, so fair warning that The Detritus Review may not be your kind of site. (Also, those of you who object to profanity are going to want to stay far, far away.)

But if the piercing of pretentious balloons and wholesale teardown of conventional wisdom is your kind of thing, you'll love it. Personally, I'll be spending the next several weeks plowing through their considerable archive...

*Eduard Hanslick, as those of you who've been attending Inside the Classics concerts since the beginning will remember, was the German critic who declared Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto to be an unholy mess that "stank to the ear."