As you may have seen, from many angles, the dayglo casket of post-acid house dance culture is being gently lowered into the ground. The bloated vanguard of dance music will shortly be retiring to their tasteless homes to grow even more bloated, only to be replaced by those ten years younger than them, playing music that is ten times worse.

Despite this decline, the shower of sodom that is the UK dance music press still proclaim 'Business as usual!' in the maniacal tone of the unflinching propaganda machine of a dictatorship in decline. The mainstream dance music press; those endless rows of glossy rags with front-covers displaying lurid and benign exposes of drugs in the UK – or the smug, shit-eating grin of the latest record-playing man raised to demi-god status – still shout at us from the shelves of WH Smiths, begging us to want to do something other than wipe our arses with them.

So whatever happened to dance music journalism?

What used to be a noble feast of subcultural scholarship from the likes of Savage, Penman and Reynolds has declined into a penny-sweet tuck-shop for quasi-talented fashion magpies trying to nab themselves a free cola bottle. The age of criticism, were there ever one in the mainstream dance music press, has long gone.

Record reviewing, in particular, has become an exercise in finding out how long you can get sent free records for, and the result, for the reader, is the singularly unbearable dirge of having to read the gushing verbal blowjobs granted to anyone who manages to release a 'dance' CD. Most reviews stem from the malignant laziness of music journalists, coming in late on a Tuesday, with five albums to review and an hour until deadline, their noses dripping with cocaine, their eardrums still ringing with the thump of a million kick-drums, and their brains desperately trying to muster up that single ounce of creativity that one of their GCSE English teachers once suggested they had. The only thing to do is rehash the Press Release – itself a sycophantic stream of drivel desperately fashioned together by a bored PR-drone intent on further inflating the bloated ego of the artist in question.

There will be the odd the journo who, after listening to his hundredth god-awful album of the week, dares to rubbish the producer. But there is no hope for him. He will no doubt shudder at the threat of industry lynching and immediate cessation of future supplies of free CDs and vinyl, and return gingerly to his keyboard to dutifully type out a weak eulogy for the benefit of the artist's PR-gestapo. If, God forbid, a bad review is ever given, it's usually an astonishingly inept critique of some unbridled genius, future-classic LP that happens to exist outside the short-sighted uterus that the moron reviewer is impregnated in.

The result is a level of criticism that has become about as meaningful as asking a male porn-star to review his own cock.

And have feature writers no shame? Is it not perpetually humiliating to have to spend hour upon hour digging up the mundane and unispiring life story of every tech-house clone who has managed to string together ten tracks of underwhelmingly pedestrian and barely distuingishable tech-house? The only factor forgiving the journos for making us read such drivel is that the vast majority of the mediocre doppelgangers producing this rot were woefully bereft of talent in the first place, and no amount of weak, poorly constructed metaphors about food are going to convince even the most shot-away legions of pill-casualties to the contrary.

If there is any comfort to be had about music journalists, let it be this: though they may command respect and admiration from the hoards of YTS-clubbers who hanker for their empty privileges and cod-champagne lifestyle, the fact remains that they probably earn at least a couple of grand less than the gormless prole who cleans out your local public shitter.

And if that's not justice, then I'm a fucking music journalist.