Air Guitar Nation

I watched this documentary Air Guitar Nation, and it is amazing.

The filmmakers are just a couple of guys in New York who hear in passing about a world air guitar competition that's held in Denmark every year. It's one of those little News of the Weird things you see online or whatever, no big deal. But then they find out that America is not only unrepresented at this thing, but there has never been an American air guitar contestant. Though they couldn't give a shit about an air guitar competition - they laugh about the idea - still... America is the fucking birth place of rock, and there's no one to represent?! This cannot stand.

So they rent out a bar and put up fliers that they're gonna have the east coast air guitar contest. It's still just this funny little thing they're doing. Then Howard Stern talks about it... and hundreds of people show up.

Including a local actor whose stage name is C-Diddy. He's a Korean dude who dresses up in a Hello Kitty chest plate and a red cape. Just like the filmmakers, he treats the whole things as a joke, just something funny to do.

However, his closest competition doesn't think it's a joke. His stage name is Bjorn Turoque, and he feels that air guitar is an art form. He takes it very seriously. While C-Diddy is all about costumes and performance, Bjorn works from the inside-out... he creates a core rock star persona, and brings that out on stage.

C-Diddy is kind of our in to this world, because he shares the viewpoint of the filmmakers and the audience of laughing at air guitar. I mean, c'mon... air guitar?! But as he rises through the ranks, puts work into his act and meets people who don't laugh at it, he - and we - start to get it. By act three, I was watching this on the edge of my seat, rooting for America to step up and represent against Europe's best.

Like most of the best documentaries, there are twists to this true story that blow away anything in fiction. I won't ruin anything - I want you to watch this movie, and experience these bizarre situations for yourself. Because I think, also like the best docs, this is using something that's kinda silly on its face to discuss themes that are very honest and human.

While watching Air Guitar Nation, I was thinking of The King of Kong and Darkon. Taken together, I think these three movies offer perhaps the truest discussion I've seen of the congruence of dreams with reality.

Like Steve Wiebe and Donkey Kong in Kong, C-Diddy and Bjorn put a huge amount of time and effort into perfecting what's basically a useless skill. If you were trapped on a desert island, getting a high score in Donkey Kong or having an awesome air guitar performance won't help you survive, for example. And, even sans the desert island scenario, these are skills that are the ultimate of inside baseball, only appreciated by a very small society of like-minded individuals, and laughed at by the world at large. BUT -- both Steve and C-Diddy express a desire to be the best in the world at something, anything - it doesn't matter what it is.

This isn't a unique urge to these two. I subscribe to Game Informer, and they like do to interviews with people who get high scores in various games. And the response they get is very consistently a variation on: "I don't care if it's a video game, I'm the best in the world."

And it's not just games. How do you explain the people who do weird shit just to get into the Guinness Book of World Records? There's no direct reward. For instance, playing basketball won't help you on a desert island either, but if you're the best basketball player in the world, you'll be rewarded with money, women, status and fame. Not so for the guy who can eat the most Madagascar cockroaches inside of a minute.

It's a desire to be unique, to be special, to show that you were put here for a reason. It's a desire for Steve Wiebe to be able to say yes, there are many seventh-grade science teachers in the world, but I'm the only seventh-grade science teacher that has ever lived who's flipped the Donkey Kong kill screen. The only one ever.

How else do you explain American Idol? Dancing with the Stars? America's Got Talent? Any fucking game show or reality show, for that matter? "There are many truck drivers in the world, but only one of them has competed on Survivor, and that one is me."

The vast majority of the human race is okay with mediocrity. But there are a percentage who are not. Some of that percentage have special skills or intelligence that allow them to become rich and successful. But what if you're not a very special person, yet at the same time you want to be special, anyway?

There is something very true and uniquely human about this urge.

Also - like C-Diddy and the filmmakers, I stopped laughing after a while, and eventually came to understand what made air guitar special not only for the people who enjoyed it, but objectively, to see it as an art form.

Okay, walk with me, here...

You hear a band and like their music. You buy the CD or the iTune or whatever. You can listen to that music all you want, you own it. But then you hear the band is coming to town. So you go see them... Why?

They're just going to play the same songs you already own, and can listen to all day. What's the reasoning behind spending more time and money to hear the song played again?

I get that there's something cool about being able to go, "Hey, it's Metallica! Standing right there! Like... right there, man!" But I've listened to a lot of live albums, and it's a very, very rare song that sounds better live than when it's recorded in a pro studio with professional production. It begs the question: when you buy concert tickets, what exactly are you paying for?

The performance.

You want to see rock stars act like rock stars on a stage, and give a performance. I've seen this from both sides. I've gone to shows and dug what the band was doing on stage - they're the stories you tell your friends about the show the next day. And while playing in bands, I saw a lot of acts who were four or five petrified white kids just fucking standing there, staring straight ahead, playing the songs they'd practiced in their garage and shuffling off stage... to a deafening silence. If you play in a band, you gotta jump around and be a maniac. If people just want music, they buy a CD or mp3. If they want to see a band, they're paying for a performance.

Okay. Put a pin in that, and let's talk about eurhythmics, which are just body movements made in response to sound. If you're tapping your foot while listening to a song, that's a eurhythmic. Obviously, that extends to dance. And just as obviously, this applies to air guitar - the act of playing an imaginary guitar while listening to music.

Dance is considered an art form.

If you spend five hundred dollars to sit in the front row at a Russian ballet, you're dropping that money to watch people in costumes move their bodies in response to music. They are not playing the music - the music is being created by either an orchestra (unseen, in a pit) or a playback of something that's been pre-recorded. No one would argue whether or not ballet is art... not just an art, but high art.

Thus, it follows that any performance that involves a person putting on a costume, getting on a stage and moving in rhythm with music that they do not themselves play is a form of art. This could apply to ballet... or air guitar.

Now - couple the paying audience's desire for a rock star performance with the idea that eurhythmics presented in the context of a performance brings us to the conclusion that, when taken seriously, air guitar is art.

Air Guitar Nation was made before Rock Band and Guitar Hero became the massive entities they now are. These titles aren't just hit video games - they're cultural phenomena. For a while, I had a somewhat elitist view of these games. I thought, if people want to play AC/DC, why don't you pick up a real guitar, learn AC/DC songs and play them? But after watching Air Guitar Nation, I got over myself and realized it is like karaoke, a temporary fulfillment of a dream of being a rock star.

And that's what brought me to Darkon. In both Darkon and Air Guitar Nation, the people who are involved say variations of: "In real life, I'm this normal person. But when I'm doing XYZ, I'm special."

The game the people play in Darkon allows them to pretend they're fantasy heroes. The game people play in Air Guitar Nation allows them to pretend they're rock stars. In both cases, it's an arena of using imagination to engage in a waking dream.

And, as explained by the hero of Darkon, dreams are a way to find value in lives that would ordinarily not be considered valuable.

In Air Guitar Nation, we learn that the contestants are judged on a variety of factors: performance, costume, etc. The usual stuff. But there is an x-factor. One of the criteria is called: "airness." It is difficult to qualify in a hard-and-fast way, but is generally described by the people in the doc as the part of your performance that transcends air guitar, and becomes something else. C-Diddy learns that the greats in the air guitar world achieve their wins because they have mastered airness.

And I thought: what if you applied that concept to other things besides air guitar? What if you applied that to life? How can you approach normal life in such a way that it transcends that humdrum reality, and becomes something else?

Like airness, it's hard to qualify in a firm way. And that's because it's via imagination and dreams.

I have seen a lot of brilliant documentaries in the last couple of years. I think it's a cinematic form that is really coming into its own. And I always come away from the best docs with a thought that's affected me, some lesson learned. There's a value to these movies that is - directly or indirectly - applicable to life. Because they're the stories of human beings, and are thus relatable to anybody who can stop laughing at the weirdoes long enough to open their eyes and realize that we're all weirdoes, just in different ways.