| Fatima “Rockness Monster” Hoang |
When I showed up to find the will-call line outweighing the ticket line eight to one I should have noticed that something was up, but the scenario was really too “Hollywood” to seem conspicuous. When I arrived at the window and inquired about the press list 20 minutes later I was told to “go to the other side”. ”The other side of what,” I asked. The direction was repeated. ”The other side of the building,” I continued. I got a nod. On the “other side” I found a guy that I recognized as the same one who had initially told me to get in the will-call line for my press pass. He was now selling tickets out of his pocket. While he may not have been a bouncer, he had earlier been conducting traffic in club’s doorway, wearing a jacket that said “STAFF.” ”You want a ticket,” he asked me when I approached him. I told him “No” and attempted to explain my situation, but he had moved on to a ticket seeker with money in hand. When I finally found the press liaison, I discovered that my name was not on the list. “Just go in,” I was told, “and come back out in about 20 minutes and I’ll have a press pass for you.” While I long ago gave up on rock ‘n’ roll, and I had yet to enter this venue to witness any performance, this night had already presented to me three of my favorite rock clichés:
1) The façade of feverish popular interest presented by a line of people queued up in front of a club (all of whom are actually getting in because somebody has secured them free tickets)
2) the help blatantly skimming the fat off the profits, and
3) the cool insiders’ agreement that technicalities like, say, tickets or press credentials are really no big deal. Rock on.
An air guitar contest-one to which spectators get dressed up to go and watch participants who appear on nationally syndicated late-night talk shows-achieves the unfortunate clarity of saying more about the death of rock ‘n’ roll than you might think. The US Air Guitar Championship is billed as a celebration of Rock, but it’s more a celebration of a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy; it’s not about performing along to your favorite performer, but rather about performing along to the video that’s playing in your head. As Gavin McInnes, a former US Air Guitar judge and a co-founder of Vice magazine has said, “It’s about rocking out in your bedroom where [points to self]… this is the number one fan. You’re your own rock concert.” I hesitate to pose this question, as it has been asked so many times and is so rarely met with a reasonable or straightforward response, but: Why, when one could actually learn to play guitar and pursue fame and glory and sex and drugs, etc., would one choose to bother perfecting a stage act that completely fictionalizes one of the most dramatic pursuits in American culture? (It’s all so meta.) Either you are rolling your eyes at the question or you have a sense of the kind of cynicism that would breed such an event. Once inside, I took three pages of notes, which I can no longer read, and recorded fifteen minutes of vocal notes, which I can’t decipher from the static of the crowd. I also missed a lot of the show because I was standing in line at the bar or outside smoking cigarettes. So I’m mostly just making this up as I go. And that, dear reader, is my personal vision of rock ‘n’ roll. Or, you know, cynicism. Anyway, let me get this out of the way before I run out of room: Shit was totally fixed. Here’s the simple scenario: L.A. dude (Fatima “Rockness Monster” Hoang) wins in L.A. (@ the Key Club, easily the Sunset Strip’s least glamorous venue) with a song by an appropriately over-mythologized L.A. icon (“Stop” by Jane’s Addiction). As magical a coincidence as that tepid triumvirate may have appeared to the judges, Hoang was clearly inferior to his competitors in the finals — one Dan “Bjorn Turoque” Crane, of New York City and Daniel “Glitter” Alvarez of Austin — in at least one of the three criteria of judgment. In reference to the criterion of “Technical Merit,” which involves believable fretwork in sync with the music, the spastic, unfocused Hoang (watch this video of Hoang in action to witness his penchant for digression) didn’t quite measure up to either of his opponents, particularly the masterfully wanking Crane. As for “Airness,” which involves [quoting the US Air Guitar rulebook here] “the extent to which a performance transcends the imitation of a real guitar and becomes and [sic] art form in and of itself,” every one of the clowns who entered this competition is an artist, given a liberal enough definition of the term (i.e., it was a three-way tie). And while the third criterion, “Stage Presence,” which is loosely translated as the ability to rock a crowd, appeared to belong to Hoang and his opportunistic manipulation of the hometown crowd, the mere snatching of opportunity does not a champion make. OK, fine: it doesn’t make you a champion unless we’re talking about rock ‘n’ roll. Which would suggest that there might be something rock ‘n’ roll about the US Air Guitar Championships. (But only by default.)