August 7th, 2009
By Jeff
When playing regular guitar is just not enough anymore…
You’re at home, outside, or in the car listening to music when suddenly a song breaks into an awesome riff or killer solo, and without even realizing it, your arms involuntarily begin to mimic the guitarist.
Congratulations, you are now playing Air Guitar, something every rock fan has experienced, yet most are ashamed to admit it. That is definitely not the case with the subjects of Alexandra Lipsitz‘s true-life documentary Air Guitar Nation .
With a plotline that oddly resembles 2006’s Broken Lizard-soirée Beerfest , Air Guitar Nation follows the exploits of two Air Guitarists from New York, David ‘C-Diddy’ Jung and Dan ‘Bjourn Turoque’ Crane, who aspire to represent the United States for the first time at the ‘Air Guitar World Championships’ in Finland. These guys buy into their artificial ‘stage’ personalities so earnestly, it’s like watching method actors of Brando and DeNiro’s caliber.
What makes Air Guitar Nation fun to watch is how Lipsitz manages to document these people and their world without condemning the absurdity of what they’re doing. The camera, as an outside observer, follows these “guitarists” as they travel from the first-ever US Air Guitar Tournament in New York, to the National Championship at The Roxy in Los Angeles, and finally to the small town of Oulu in northern Finland. There, a crowd of over 5,000 gather to see the world’s most die-hard air guitarists battle for the crown.
Surprisingly, this tournament was first held in 1996 and gets bigger and bigger every year. Now that air guitar has caught on in America, this harmless pastime has turned even more into a sacred cult-phenomenon.
Air Guitar Nation not only covers the prestigious tournament, but also explores the curious background of how this movement was started by college students who believed if everyone in the world carried an air guitar around with them, they wouldn’t be able to hold a gun. In Europe, air guitaring has been around so long that it is now considered to be a pure art form!
So, if you find yourself air guitaring a little more than normal and feel a calling to get on stage and show people what you’ve got, it might be a good idea to check out Air Guitar Nation to learn the ropes first.
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