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Let's impose a moratorium on rock critics. Now. A few months ago, I came across this line by critic David Dunlap, Jr.: "[The band] Windsor for the Derby has plenty of experience jumping subgenres … everything from slo-core to krautrock to electronica to its current flavor of Mancunian-tinged postrock."

Call me square, dismiss me as an oldster, but I think when you're referring to Mancunian-tinged postrock, it's time to hang it up. Pop music criticism has grown so insular, full of itself, hipper-than-thou, and, most important, aesthetically disjointed from the thing it claims to examine that we'd best start over—beginning with a rediscovery of the granddaddy of all modern rock critics, Lester Bangs [pictured above].

Some rock critics who see that sentence will howl in outrage. Bangs, they contend, is the problem. Since his death in 1982, hordes of imitators have sought to claim his mantle. Bangs was rude, obnoxious, narcissistic, drug-addled, and brilliant. His numerous heirs are only the first four. "Bangs's enduring influence strikes me as a cancer," wrote Brian James on popmatters.com, "one that needs swift uprooting if its current purveyors ever expect to become a worthy alternative to the detested corporate mags." Ira Robbins was even harsher at salon.com: "What was once garret zealotry—practiced by idealists driven to spew, destroy and proselytize—is now well-placed product shilling … [and] celebrity worship written by well-funded content providers, pushed by powerful flacks and neutered by timid editors."

Yet James and Robbins are wrong. Not about the lousy writing and narcissism of the Bangs imitators, but about mainstream "corporate" magazines and newspapers. Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times frequently pan popular rock bands, and sometimes it can get vicious (see the Times' atomizing of Coldplay earlier this year). "Even the largest and most powerful and most established music magazines lack the spine to disagree with their readers," Robbins writes. But rock critics will often contradict popular opinion about a hot band, as the frequency of three-star (out of five) reviews in Rolling Stone attests. What the writers and editors won't do is contradict the libertine ethos that guides the music press, if not rock music. And—as many of them have conveniently forgotten—one of the things that made Lester Bangs great was that he did precisely this.

Take just one piece (in fact my favorite Bangs piece), Bangs' review of the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks. When the album came out in 1968, Bangs says, he was deeply depressed, "nerves shredded and ghosts and spiders looming across the mind." Then he writes this: "in the condition I was in, [Astral Weeks] assumed at the time the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk; what's more, it was proof that there was something left to express artistically besides nihilism and destruction." In Astral Weeks "there was a redemptive element in the blackness, ultimate compassion for the suffering of others, and a swath of pure beauty and mystical awe that cut right through the heart of the work." This was a tonic, wrote Bangs, because "the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in its maw and was pulling straight down." In another piece, Bangs made this observation: "There's a new culture shaping up [in 1970], and while it's certainly an improvement on the repressive society now nervously aging, there is a strong element of sickness in our new, amorphous institutions. The cure bears viruses of its own."

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