Tonight, Brando and I are watching VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the '80s." (What debate?) Before a commercial break, they cut to a bunch of people doing air guitar and air drums to the tune of The Cult's "Love Removal Machine," and they all look like they're listening to music from a different program, no rhythm at all. One pathetic freak is bopping around the set in a headband and purple spandex. Yes, spandex.
Now, you have to understand that Brando is a mean air musician. He has, to the great delight of many of our friends, done a killer rendition of the Midwestern Drum Solo and Midwestern Guitar Solo at many parties over the years, including our former roommate's wedding three years ago. (These renditions are "Midwestern" in the cheezy, arena-rock sense of bands like Styx and Kansas and Night Ranger.) He wails on that air drum or air guitar with appropriate sound effects, something which, in the YouTube era, I have been begging him to film and post:
Brando, pointing out the spaz in the purple spandex, doing his air guitar: You know, that's the world champion air guitarist.
Me: That guy? You're better than that guy. You do an air guitar that would make that guy look like CC DeVille.
Brando: I know! He's terrible.
Me: You should enter the air-guitar championships. If that guy can win, you can win.
Brando: But I don't want to be the world's air-guitar champion. That's why I never put the Midwestern Drum Solo on YouTube. It's one thing to do at parties, but if I put it on YouTube, it would be me, Star Wars kid and Britney Spears Fan at the convention. Nobody ever said of Hemingway, He won a Nobel Prize, and by the way, he also played a mean air drum.
Touche, my dear, touche.
I suppose he's right. That kid crying all over YouTube about Britney Spears may get his own reality show, but no one will ever take him seriously again
Posted by: churlita | October 16, 2008 at 08:40 AM