In a society where everyone's a celebrity or yearns to be one, regardless of talent or outstanding attributes, the status of the rock star is somewhat diminished.

Now anyone can drink to excess, strut around wearing ill-fitting leather trousers, don oversized sunglasses indoors and purchase a Ramones T-shirt without ever having heard a note of their music. You can buy the look, believe the myth and attempt to live the lifestyle ... until, of course, it's time to return to the office, bank or call centre.

Music for all intents and purposes is regarded as free by many people now, and unfortunately the value attached or respect garnered by most modern musicians is often fleeting, if indeed it exists at all. When you have access to every recorded track, film, concert and performance at the click of a button, the mystique, reverence and excitement generated by some outlandish eccentric clasping a guitar seems to be increasingly inconsequential.

Because there are immeasurable ways to enjoy oneself in an ocean of quick-fix entertainment, joining a music tribe doesn't seem to feature too highly on the list these days. Gone are the punks, mods, goths, B-boys, ravers, hippies or equivalent in today's youth-quake. Now a uniform beard, checked shirt and pair of skinny jeans fits all. In an age when more astonishing, inventive music is being made than ever before in human history, with more ways of accessing and consuming it, a distinct homogeneity of taste abounds.

Amid cries of "it's all been done before" or "music's not as good as it was in the 1960s/1970s1980s", one business that does inevitably continue to boom is nostalgia. Back catalogue, reissued, re-packaged, re-mastered music and its constant documentation does a roaring trade. As author and journalist Simon Reynolds asserts in his thought-provoking Retromania book, pop culture is addicted to and mesmerised by its own past.

For many, the contemporary cutting-edge is simply not good enough. Travel back in time, often only by a decade or so, and you'll find an authenticity that's missing from the glut of mediocrity currently on offer. I refer to the mainstream, of course; the underground is alive and kicking as always, in spite of being uniformly sidelined. If you look for the extraordinary, however, you will find it.

Although previous generations have lauded their own heroes and forerunners, today's hunger for pop's past is insatiable. Age-old rockers are still bigger than the stars of today, it appears. In amongst BBC Four documentaries, MOJO, Q and Shindig magazines, countless blogs and reissue record labels such as Rhino, Ace, Charly or Cherry Red, the music biopic is still an constant at cinemas and occasionally even momentarily harnesses the zeitgeist.

I don't wholeheartedly support the concept of the rock biopic, although I've always wanted to. Like others, I'm excited by the buzz surrounding a film about an interesting artist and yearn for its potential to be fulfilled. However, when I see an actor playing John Lennon in Backbeat or Sid Vicious in Sid & Nancy, I'm left unconvinced, despite excellent performances in those cases by Ian Hart and Gary Oldman respectively.

Through archived footage of interviews, conversations and performances - and most importantly through their music itself - I feel a genuine connection to these eccentrics and don't want them misrepresented or cheapened for mass consumption. Perhaps I'm too close, but even a strong performance can seem trite, clichéd and hackneyed.

There are notable exceptions here and there. The Ian Curtis biopic Control looked and sounded just right with a tastefully selected soundtrack and the original Joy Division photographer Anton Corbijn in charge. Or take the film Frank, which incorporates elements of Frank Sidebottom's own life story into a highly original yet surreal, fictional comedy drama.

On the other hand, Oliver Stone's The Doors was laugh-out-loud hilarious in places. Apparently some scenes were actually invented for the sole purpose of the film itself. We must remember that these were, or in some cases still are, real people with real events being re-enacted. It's embarrassing...

Cynicism aside, these films do fulfil a role as not all cinema-goers are music obsessives with near encyclopaedic knowledge of 20th-century rock and pop. Films such Walk The Line or Ray helped introduce the essential music of Johnny Cash and Ray Charles to a brand new demographic, albeit within the sanitised, glossy confines of a Hollywood blockbuster.

This year alone we've had a Hendrix film, All Is By My Side, featuring Andre 3000 from Outkast in the lead role, and the James Brown story Get On Up will be blazoned across our cinemas later this week. If younger audiences discover their magical musical heritage and learn about their harsh upbringing then all the better, even if the final films do turn out to be turkeys. Maybe I'm being slightly po-faced and humourless here. After all, it's just good old-fashioned entertainment, isn't it? Well, in my eyes these cultural pioneers, many of whom fought injustice and prejudice to bring their music and message to an unenlightened, unmoral majority, simply deserve better. It's a shame to see them turned into cartoon superheroes or semi-fictional characters from some untouchable, halcyon, bygone era.

I love their music and know their historical importance, but would like the same kudos and coverage heaped upon today's artists as well. Culture should always move forward as well as referencing its past. If not, there will be no worthy reissues, documentaries, biopics or even celebrities in decades to come.

Vic Galloway presents on BBC Radio Scotland at 8.05pm on Mondays. Tomorrow's show features a BBC Introducing Session from Glasgow garage-rockers Deathcats. Vic's book Songs In The Key Of Fife is out now, published by Polygon. Contact Vic at www.twitter.com/vicgalloway