Guitar Hero (List 2)

I've just realised what a sad sorry state the legacy of guitar heroes is in. Right now, think of all the up to date popular bands of the moment - Hadouken!, The Enemy, Joe Lean, Foals, Fall Out Boy, Paramore....
Amongst them, there is not one guitar hero. There is not one maverick, intensely exciting guitar manipulator who crosses lines, punctuates music with noise or will pioneer a new style.
All I can do is look to those who have inspired me.
Jimi Hendrix - not the bluesey, widdley Hendrix that everyone seems to make up in their heads having not listened to a note of his music, but rather the guitar-shagging, feedback-howling, Star Spangled Banner-mangling fiend who set fire to his guitar, allowed his sound to degenerate into a sonic mess and genuinely reached for the stars with his sound.
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins - a man who tracked 40 guitars onto one song in order to destroy planets with it.
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine - a hip-hop enthusiast who wanted to put DJs out of business by replicating whistle calls and vinyl scratching on guitar.
Thurston Moore and Lee Ronaldo of Sonic Youth - a duo who followed the teachings of Glenn Branca (a man who would create "human chords" by tuning a guitar's six strings all to one note and subsequently compose a chord from separate players) by jamming drumsticks under the strings of the twelfth fret, using contact mics attached to drills upon pickups, who scraped, pulled and abused the guitar as much as played a note.
Spiral Stairs and Stephen Malkmus of Pavement - who played beautiful passages of country-esque clean melodies, dropping countless bum notes into their arpeggios and then blasted the cobwebs with ugly, broken distortion.
Dave Knudson from Botch/Minus The Bear - his reverb soaked, melodic patterns fill the air with electric neon lights and rugged textures the Edge could only wet-dream of.
Kurt Cobain of Nirvana - a troubled young man who frequently disregarded harmonic theory and played with violence and emotion.
Ian McKaye and Guy Picciotto of Fugazi - two hardcore pioneers who bled reggae and emo -core influences, creating awkward, vibrant and angular sounds which verged on metal.
Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs - a simple garage punk riffer who seemed more concerned with learning detuned death metal inbetween recordings, yet ended up garotting, caressing and tickling you with the simplest sounds.
Matt Bellamy of Muse - taking after his heroes, he summoned spaceships and solar systems with his hyperactive classical style loaded with distortion and built-in Kaos Pad fury.
Dave Lake of KaitO - one of the hardest losses of recent years, Kaito's guitarist loaded his frontwoman's simple chords with the most avant-garde explorations of noise/melody heard in the last five years.
Graham Coxon of Blur - seriously. Listen to his playing on Country House, then listen to This Is A Low, then listen to the stammering riff of On Your Own, then listen to the solo of Country Sad Ballad Man. A guy who used to throw his Telecaster into the air as high as possible at gigs to see what it sounded like HAS to be worshipped.
Dylan Carlson of Earth - picture this: Dylan walks on stage, turns the amp on, turns up the volume, leans his guitar against the amplifier so as to promote vibration feedback then steps out into the crowd. 40 minutes later, after the drummer has exhausted himself, Dylan emerges from the crowd, switches off the amp and walks off stage with his bandmates. Truly a genius.
Glenn Branca - I've mentioned him already, but just check out one of his solos on youtube. Since when did pick scrapes, mind-melting volume and total atonal noise constitute a solo? Probably since he did it, and guitar playing/music/the world is all the better for it.
William and Jim Reid of the Jesus and Mary Chain - without any intention of learning to play, William would hang a guitar round his neck like bling and allow the guitar to howl with feedback. Better than a Slash solo.
Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine - used a different set of effects pedals for each song and warped the speakers of hundreds of indie kids with Loveless, an album that took five years in a studio and bankrupted Creation Records, mainly because Shields fucked up the guitar mixes with insane walls of noise.

I could go on forever. There are so many players who make me want to un-learn the guitar, piece together masterpieces of eternal musical/experimental value and wreck eardrums. What are the youth doing about it? Listen to Health, Crystal Castles and School of Language. Listen to Die! Die! Die! and Popular Workshop. Listen to anything where guitars don't sound like guitars, or do sound like guitars, but like you were the one who invented the instrument, and be inspired to wreck the legacy of assumed guitar heroes forever. I never ever ever want to hear 12 bar blues played in my presence again. I never want to hear a classic rock riff played in front of me. I want to hear people who can't play. I want to hear people who would rather use the acoustics of the room coupled with overloading homemade pedals to capture something that may never be played again. Let's do it. Let's burn the blueprints, the chord maps, the tablature, restring our guitars with random guages and start playing with fish hooks attached to our fingers. I can't imagine anything more exciting than this.