Believe it or not, no one has ever done a full length scholarly study of the art of air guitaring--despite the fact that playing the air guitar is such an entrenched aspect of contemporary popular culture that there are actually Air Guitar World Championships (their stated purpose is to "promote world peace" because "according to the ideology of the Air Guitar, wars would end and all bad things would disappear, if all the people in the world played the Air Guitar".) The dire scholarly omission that is the absence of air guitar scholarship is about to change, however. The London Telegraph reports that Amanda Griffiths, a 32-year-old dance teacher from Wales who is also a doctoral student at the University of Salford and a former contestant in regional air guitar competitions, will write her Ph.D. thesis on the art of air guitar. Griffiths, who is being supervised by Salford's resident chair of pop music, Sheila Whitely, will focus on gender differences in air guitar techniques and will use the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault to develop her ideas. She has been invited to present her work later this month in Finland, at a training camp for the upcoming air guitar world championships.

Thanks to Fred Ray for the link.

This is an outrage! O altitudo! Matthew Arnold is turning over in his grave, while my Great-Aunt Rosie is doing the watutsi with the Air Guitar Champion himself! This is the end of Western Culture! Air Guitar! French theorists! Ye gods! Zounds! However will we survive this Great Ice-Age of the Soul!?!?

crazy. really

anyone care to explain what is a air guitar?

I was with her until Foucault and Barthes.

Yoalnda: It's pretending to play a guitar, with no guitar present. Typically done by fans of hard rock or heavy metal, though I suppose jazz guitar fans or blues fans might do it as well, in rare cases.

Often accompanied by headbanging or bad singing.

Air guitar is a counter-hegemonic discourse of the body, a mimicry in motion that at once preserves and deconstructs the phallogocentric guitar pyrotechnics of a dominantly male rock culture. The present absence of the phallic guitar in air guitar empowers the subject interpellated by the gestural ritual of air guitar performativity -- the body is raised over a techno-fascistic revelation of technique.

Luther understands it. Or perhaps, encompasses in his world view the subtext of the facilitating, empowering nature of artistic expression unrestrained by crass material instruments.

Foucault and Barthes? There's no hope - the whole area will fall into the black hole of Theory.

I note that Ms Whitely's Ph.D students are exploring "anarcho punk, heavy metal, progressive rock, Northern Soul, and Gender". They might benefit from a fortnight or two at Leeds.

I'm looking forward to hearing the upcoming "Concerto for Air Guitar", said to be premiered at next year's Proms Concerts.

Mr. Blissett deserves a prize for his last post; I do not think that Ms. Griffiths' dissertation will make it past committee unless she footnotes Blissett--heavily.

It is indeed disturbing that academia has waited so long to address this vital topic. Priorities must b way out of line, and/or resources must be even scarcer than we thought. Clearly, there needs to be an immediate increase in funding of university humanities departments, both so that vital research such as this can be addressed in the short run, and so that we can build the civilizational asset of PhDs to enable more such research in the future.

"according to the ideology of the Air Guitar, wars would end and all bad things would disappear, if all the people in the world played the Air Guitar".

Well, duh. I mean, who didn't see Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure?