I Reminisce About The Days Of Old By Flailing Around Like An Idiot At The Bowery Ballroom Air Guitar Show

At its “best,” air guitar is a spontaneous unconscious reaction to the “hot licks” and “heavy riffs” in guitar-based rock music. Tom Cruise in “Risky Business” exemplifies this. (Sorry to mention that name, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t tithing into the next astral plane back then.) The scene, ridiculous on its face (Bob Seger should have been stopped long ago!), evokes an I guess accurate (ha!) geeky-adolescent-boy-when-no-one-is-watching tone.

At its worst, air guitar is a cynical hipster meta response to the worst of the last 25 years of popular culture:

It is Thurday afternoon. Roughly ten hours from now, a shirtless William Ocean — the word air shaved into his chest hair — will shock a sold-out Bowery Ballroom with a full standing flip onto his back that crushes an empty beer can he has set onstage. He will then leap on someone’s shoulders and be carried like a conquering hero through the rapturous crowd, returning to the stage only to reveal the American-flag-print Speedos lurking beneath his sparkly pants, as his audience gleefully dissolves into a sea of pumped fists and cries of “Ocean! Ocean! Ocean!” All this will occur while he mimics the guitar solo to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”

. . .

At last year’s nationals in L.A., Ocean (then representing Chicago) and [To Air Is Human author and perennial air guitar also-ran Björn] Türoque were bested in the finals by hometown hero Rockness Monster, who got obliterated in Norway by some dude from Holland. American pride is now at stake. We must reclaim the prize. The Bowery’s judging panel — the co-founder of Vice magazine, a Daily Show correspondent, an Atlantic A&R rep, and 2004 Air Guitar world champ Sonyk-Rok — will thus be brutally tough on contestants.

Ocean had anticipated this, though, and over lunch discusses his intense training regimen: loads of Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses, and AC/DC on his iPod as he runs through a workout routine of deep knee bends, splits, and stretches. He has come a long way from his adolescence, spent unconsciously playing air guitar along to the Beverly Hills 90210 theme. He is through fucking around. “I’m kind of known as the guy who goes up onstage and batters his body,” Ocean says. “I’m leaving it all on the stage. I plan on leaving on a stretcher.”

This is not irony. It is, however, absurd. “It’s kind of ridiculous, to tell you the truth,” William admits of his ascending celebrity. “CNN came to my house last night.”