Thousands Watch as Smiley Rod Takes 2020 Online Championships
In the United States this year, two professional sports-like organizations started their seasons while all the others continued to focus on greed and their own self-interest over safety and what was best for the country. First to open was the PGA tour – a zero-contact, terribly expensive way to play marbles.
Within days of PGA’s opening, US Air Guitar announced its own 2020 season, which included competitors from across the country and record viewership that reached every state in the union. After high-level talks with the CDC and our favorite venues across the country, USAG determined the best way to satisfy its demanding fans while keeping our seemingly invincible yet repeatedly proven fragile competitors safe was to move all qualifiers and the 2020 US Air Guitar Championships 100% online.
Twenty-six competitors performed Saturday night to a crowd of 1,300 unique viewers – roughly equivalent to selling out the Fillmore – with a similar format to an in-person USAG event: first round competitors performed to their own rehearsed routines, and the top five scores from round one advanced to a live-streamed round two. Saturday night's play-by-play and color commentary were provided by DIRTY AIRY (Aron Carlton, Santa Cruz) and NORDIC THUNDER (Justin Howard, Chicago). Meanwhile, Georgia's MOM JEANS JEANNIE (Nicole Sevcik), Atlanta's GEORGIA LUNCH (Brittany Diaz), and Larchmont's SHREDDY FUCKING MERCURY (Seth Leibowitz) judged the event.
The evening’s Master of Airemonies, JUSTIN HYPES (Seth Leibowitz), managed two costume changes and a small army of these with everyone thinking it was all part of the show. The banter between Hypes, Nordic, Dirty Airy and the judges gave the production team – Freshman interns from the University of Oulu (go Pähkinäpussit!) – breathing room to squash a few bugs and slam their salmiakki liqueur and red bulls.
[Click here to watch the full show on twitch]
First round performances, long-since freed from the limitations of "there guitars," were now equally unencumbered by the physical limitations of the stage through the new online format. Perhaps most strikingly, Texas' legendary THRILLIE NELSON (Taylor Fullbright) entered on a real Dutch Warmblood (it's a horse, you philistines) and simultaneously staged two longhorns to race across his intro. In the era of green screens and virtual backgrounds, Thrillie's zero special effects intro – complete with analog spacebar latency – harkened back to the good ol' days of porchfront fingerpicking and fucking livestock after nightfall.
Smiley Rod, who was crowned the 2020 US Air Guitar Online Champion, found the last grandstand on earth when he snuck onto the Christian Believers Stage at Bonnaroo to record his first round performance. Not only did Smiley wow the judges with the highest scores of the evening, but he was a fan favorite as well. Across the stream all kinds of virtual confetti cannons and furry cosplay sex dolls popped-up as more and more viewers sent their bits and signed up for subscriptions.
Even better, because of Smiley Rod's championship on-stage performance and the festival's eventual cancelation, this year US Air Guitar played the biggest stage at Bonnaroo (technically speaking).
After a heated and unprecedented online third round air-off – Julius in the van made a gametime decision to play Skid Row's "Youth Gone Wild," a compulsory track hated by everyone in attendance except Julius in the van – Portland's KARA PICANTE (Kara Muir) took second place. Her technically infallible backyard round one performance to Rob Zombie's "Dead Girl Superstar" was surpassed only by her second round compulsory performance where she moved the party from back to front yard and outscored Smiley Rod by a tenth of a point, thus forcing the air-off. At the show's finish, Smiley's routine was a couple beats ahead of Kara's as he finished with a three-tenths of a point lead.
Long before we crowned a champion, the show began with a dedication to justice from KENNY ROGAIRS (Jason Cheung), and a challenge for our fans to help further the cause of Sean Worsley. Never in our worst nightmares did US Air Guitar expect to find itself at the intersection of our country's cherished past time and its failed carceral state. And yet here we are: Sean Worsley, an Iraq war veteran with a purple heart and a legal prescription for medical marijuana for traumatic brain injury with PTSD, was air guitaring at a gas pump in a dry county of Alabama when a police officer searched his car and found his prescription. Because his RX is considered invalid across state lines, he was arrested and is currently serving the first stint of an absurd five-year sentence. Now, I'm not paid to shit on Alabama’s criminal justice system, but I will point out that although Mr. Worsley's devil weed can get him five-to-life, good old fashioned incest 'round those parts is apparently all good in the eyes of the law.
We at USAG were honored when Eboni Worsley, Sean's wife, coordinated a phone call for our broadcast from the Pickens County Jail in Carrollton, AL, to wish our community all the best. As Sean Worsley was signing off, he had a message for all the evening's performers: "I want you guys to continue . . . rocking-out out there, while I stay strong in here. Bring it tonight, bring your best, and rock on!" As he finished, the Automated Inmate Calling system interrupted:
"You have one minute left."
There it was on painful display, all evening: the injustice between 60 seconds "out there" and 60 seconds on the inside.
As the show went on, support for Sean and Eboni Worsley snowballed. At the time of this writing, in what we hope is only the beginning, our broadcast raised over $2,000 for the cause.
Further supporting the cause, in the only way he knows how (tights, robes, twinkle toes), was COLD STEEL RENEGADE (Matthew Feldstein). For his performance, he added to his footwork and expert noodling a little cologne and single-handed sexytime to the Jeffrey Osborne classic "Stay With Me Tonight." It was one-part Hugh Hefner meets whatever kids did with Hugh Hefner's magazines. CSR did not advance to round two, owing to what some judges felt was too much sex in the monitors but not enough guitar on-stage.
Boston's OPROCK (Michael Lovely), utilizing the same trifecta of sexy music (Prince's "Shhh") and full-frontal nipples (he has two of them, thus completing the trifecta), pledged to spurn his signature glitter-spits in the interest of the environment and his own intestinal health. For many in the crowd, it was at once a disappointment and a call to action: left and right, fans cheered with their bits, scattering the broadcast with virtual glitter of their own. Oprock left his mark Saturday night as the third best 2020 US Air Guitar Online Champion.
Many other highlights from the evening will be discussed and analyzed for years to come: INCINERATOR'S (Michael Battista) citronella pyrotechnics, CHEWROCKA (Jason Smalridge) taking us all to his home planet's native redwood Funkytown, SWEETNESS (Kyle Privet) broadcasting from his mother's basement, BROZONE’S (Mike Katz’s) epically underscored performance – motherfucker – and MR. UNIVERSE (Richard Sprague) picking a fight with IKEA and losing badly.
And who will ever forget RICKY STINKFINGER'S dry-hump love story, his Rhapsody in Blue, to New York City?
The nature of stink is that it takes your breath away. Watch this performance by Mr. Stinkfinger and I dare you to prove me wrong.
Later in the program, in what has become one of the most widely discussed air guitar topics in years, and with perhaps an homage to the Peter Pan shadow scene ("clap if you believe!"), Newcomer SHADOW (Shaw Do) wowed us all by streaming his entire performance in silhouette.
Hopes for a controversy-free evening were dashed shortly after a spirited performance by HAMMAIRHEAD (Marc Adler), when a contradiction was exposed between the 2020 Online rules and the on-stage rules from previous seasons. At issue was the presence of roadies and/or plants on-stage during a performance, which in Hammairhead’s case was a sympathetic nurse attending to his ancient, sagging prosthetic ball sack, occasionally performing resuscitations, and being an all-around good friend.
When asked for clarification on this topic, play-by-play commentator DIRTY AIRY urged, "the obligatory passage point of twitch has made the gap between experts and laymen shrink exponentially. This allows all involved actors to achieve a higher level of production via network theory [. . .] As Bruno Latour’s barnacles demonstrate; innovation will arise not only in times of crisis, but also through camaraderic necessity." Amen to that.
There is so much more to unpack from Saturday's broadcast: from Yacht Lixx Hulahan southpawing on the open seas, to the hundreds of entries who didn't quite make the cut. And I hope one day, there will be an entire broadcast dedicated to Julius in the van.
Reached via our Fabreze® "fuck off!" guest line after the show, Saturday’s champion, Smiley Rod, was already thinking about his next moves in the world of competitive air guitar. “Thank you to US Air Guitar for redeeming the year 2020. Now that I’m the first virtual champion, thinking I should carpe diem, take this opportunity to really do something revolutionary, something nobody has ever done before...thinking I should do a podcast." That's right, folks. After a decade of US Air Guitar waiting on the internet to catch up to its streaming ambitions, we're finally ready to take it to the next level: uh, radio?
Smiley Rod later added, "Until then, to everyone who's tired of all the stuff this year has given us and what will inevitably continue before its close, my only advice . . . stay Smiley.”