Who do I hate more? Morrissey or Axl?

Regular sufferers of this blog know I like to have a public enemy number one: a Moriarty to my Jeremy Brett; a Joker to my Adam West; a seven evil exes to my Michael Cera.

Things have been plain sailing so far, whether I'm comparing Sean Paul to a malfunctioning karaoke machine, calling Chromeo faux-retro Prince-wannabe lifeless post-Mika pap, or poking Prince, or calling James Blunt a Milli Vanilli imposter or suggesting James Blunt be castrated or wishing James Blunt be hit by cluster bombs calling James Blunt the son of a dead cat and another dead cat or blaming the Beatles for James Blunt or saying Bono is more boring than James Blunt or comparing James Blunt to a vagina and Alexandra Burke.

But now I am torn between two new enemies: Morrissey calling a fifth of the world a subspecies or Guns N Roses' Axl Rose treating his fans like crap in Dublin.

One one hand, Mozza's flirtation with racism is a well-trodden groove he should have stepped out of more quickly. On the other hand, Rose is demonstrating a basic failure to do his job: turn up on stage and sing.

First, the flower-fondling fop. Morrissey seems to think himself untouchable, ignoring the press and replying to everything everyone ever says to him with a swooned "well, aren't we all?" He once draped himself in a flag and the liberal media has drawn daggers against him ever since. It was okay, however, for Geri Halliwell to dress in the same flag a few years later because, I s'ppose, she was well fit and that.

It's hard to know whether Simon Armitage took his quote out of context in the recent Grauniad article, but Mozza certainly seems to treat issues of nationalism with a clunk-handed carelessness that compromises his integrity and makes it difficult for his fans to love him. I think history will judge Morrissey fairly though: in the words of Armitage's poem Poem:

Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

And now to the cat-squeezed voice and the kilt and the hair. Axl Rose is in such a stratosphere of rock glory, he will have no idea what it's like to live on beans and dust for a year to save up enough money for a gig. He disappeared for forty days and forty nights before turning in an album called Chinese Democracy (are you reading, Morrissey?) which sounded turgid and confused and, even worse, boring.

Whatever went wrong with the Guns N Roses shows, who didn't wake up who and who was supposed to play until when, Rose's protestations at the organisation of the Reading and Leeds festival seemed shallow in the light of the later shambles in Dublin. But when you're in awe of bands like this, don't you expect a bit of diva nonsense, for them to over-use the illusion of the emperor's new clothes?

Both artists are living off former glories - try and find any of their fans that *don't* like their older work - and the bolt-gun of retirement hangs heavily over the old heffers. At least the Smiths frontman can still turn in a tune or two. Which brings me to my conclusion.

Axl Rose makes substandard music and presents it by snoozing in a hammock made out of his massively big head's bandana instead of hitting the stage on time. Although Morrissey can't match his past brilliance, Davyhulme's most famous quiff knows how to perform, how to write a song and how to do his flipping job.

If, instead of writing this blog, I just did a giant poo on your computer screen, although I'd be improving the quality of your user experience, I wouldn't be fulfulling the most basic element of my job description: tapping on my keyboard while hoovering a quart of Talisker then smashing 'Publish' with my forehead.

If Axl Rose can't do what he's meant to do, then he's nothing more than the anorexic bastard child of Mick Hucknall and Mickey Rourke squealing like a cat kazoo at a barrage of drunkenly-hurled bottles of piss.

Yes, Morrissey, shut up, please, just shut up, but Axl is my new public enemy number one and James Blunt can rest easy.