The literary legend, who died this week, inspired the modern idea of the rock'n'roll rebel with his character Holden Caulfield, the outsider antihero from The Catcher in the Rye

The death of JD Salinger has naturally got everyone reminiscing about his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye, one of those rare books that virtually everyone read when they were a teenager. Its distinctive mood â€' that mix of sarcasm, pathos and pained nostalgia for lost youth â€' never quite leaves you (it also has the dubious distinction of being the only book Ricky Gervais has ever read).

It's ironic that a book which pre-dated rock'n'roll has gone on to influence generations of rock lyricists, but then The Catcher in the Rye has an uncanny knack of staying forever young, speaking to successive waves of teenagers. In recent years, it's variously been a hipster bible and a sort of emo set text. To own a copy when you're young is to signal that you're something of an unquiet soul â€' an underachiever but brainy with it, a misfit but not a nerd.

It's often said that the character of Holden Caulfield invented the teenager. I'd argue that, in some sense, Caulfield also set the mould for our modern notion of the rock star â€' damaged, hyper-sensitive, infinitely cool, creative, hungry for sensation, an authentic voice in a world of phonies. Kurt Cobain, Nebraska-era Bruce Springsteen, Richey Manic, Gerard Way are all Holden Caulfields in their own way. Even Thom Yorke, with his "lost child" shtick, on songs such as Street Spirit (Fade Out) â€' the thin-skinned loner wandering the streets at night, adrift in a sea of heartless modernity.

The power of The Catcher in the Rye is its ability to make the reader feel Holden Caulfield is speaking exclusively to them. This, of course, has its downsides, as it's sometimes used as lazy lyrical shorthand for outsider status by the kind of American pop-punks who, you suspect, haven't really read many other books. To be "like Holden Caulfield" is in fact a cliche of that genre, invoked to lend literary weight to what would otherwise be mere navel-gazing angst (see The Offspring's Get It Right). Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, in the song Who Wrote Holden Caulfield, seems to misread the protagonist as a kind of pot-smoking 1990s slacker ("There's a boy who fogs his world and now he's getting lazy/There's no motivation and frustration makes him crazy"); Caulfield, a restless and fretful street-walker, has many problems, but laziness is not one of them.

The most wrong-headed "tribute" of all, however, must be Guns N' Roses' The Catcher in the Rye, from their long-delayed comeback album Chinese Democracy. Axl Rose clearly fancies himself as something of a Salinger-style recluse, maintaining a dignified silence down the years â€' rather forgetting that dignified recluses tend not to become embroiled in childish feuds with Dr Pepper, or announce lucrative world tours.

Still, you can see why Salinger's approach to creativity â€' one unrepeatable work of brilliance, followed by decades of crabby silence â€' might appeal to past-it rock stars. Salinger published his last work in 1965. You wonder if just occasionally the Rolling Stones, the Cure's Robert Smith, Lou Reed, or any other artist doomed to churn out albums of diminishing quality long after the creative fires have sputtered out, wish they'd made a similar decision, and quit while they were ahead.