Let's sack all rock critics and replace them with cartoons

We all hate rock critics, don't we? Grrr! Well, actually, it's a bit more complex than that. Thanks to the Balkanised spatchcockery of the internet we can all come together to hate music journalists in our own special and distinctive ways. Please choose one or more of the following:

The top five reasons to hate music journalists
1) One of them said something rude about a band or ridiculously bequiffed solo artist that you slavishly admire, you idiot.
2) Raw, naked, snarling jealousy. There, I said it.
3) The cringing, forelock-tugging, kow-towing notion that people who batter out chords on planks strung with wire are gods who walk among us. And those who mock them are blasphemers.
4) Because rock journalism isn't what it used to be (when you stopped reading NME).
5) Because they use the words "sophomore", "seminal" and "moniker".

Sometimes it feels as if the internet is just one giant web of interconnected music-journo haters, each feeding off and adding to the spite of the rest. Which begs the question: who in their right mind, in 2009, would want to be a music journalist? But that is, of course, a trick question. There are already too many people in their right minds in music journalism. Which is why contemporary music writing is so utterly boring. Which begs the real question: where do people not quite in their right mind go to learn how to be a rock critic?

And the answer, of course, is American cartoons. When it comes to pop music, characters in American TV cartoons do no not mess with Mr Inbetween. Characters in cartoons never ask those dumb questions: "Should I like this?", "Am I allowed to like this?", "If I say I like this, will my peer group laugh at me?"

No, cartoon characters always critique an act from the gut. The only way any critic should ever act. Which is why characters in US cartoons make better critics than actual critics. Who, by the way, would almost certainly make rubbish cartoon characters.

There are many fine examples of cartoon characters proving themselves to be better rock critics than actual rock critics. Here, however, just a few examples will have to suffice.

So there's Bart Simpson at a Smashing Pumpkins concert: "Meh. Making teenagers miserable is like shooting fish in a barrel."

Touché, Bart! Twenty years of aural sludge demolished! Then there's Homer making a band play only their one big hit. And then only the good bit. Over and over again. Which, if you admit it, is all you really want anyway, right? Sheer and shockingly honest postmodern genius, Homer.

Next we've got Family Guy's Peter Griffin rediscovering Surfin' Bird and playing the record to death until everyone around him is sick, screaming doolally mental and pulling their ears out in frustration. Don't you wish you could still appreciate moronic rock with that much intensity? Peter gives you permission.

And, finally, here's Beavis and Butthead dissecting Radiohead's Creep:
Beavis: "Why don't they just play the cool part all the way through?"
Butthead: "Well Beavis, if they didn't have a part of the song that sucked, the other part wouldn't be so cool."

I rest my case.