To Air is Human
Air
In 1987 Nike introduced the Nike Air brand, making billions of dollars selling air. A small pocket of air in one’s sole promises levity; this perhaps is even more genius than Coke selling carbonated sugar water. A year later in 1988, Metallica released …And Justice For All, and while air-guitar and air-drums had long since been funneled through the flailing limbs of certain hopeless yet hopeful youth, never before had one had to do it with such precision, a mark of that outstanding album. It has been argued that heavy metal shares many musical properties with classical music, in terms of difficult time signatures and syncopated patterns, so it is not a huge stretch to suggest that when a conductor waves his arms in the air in an exaggerated manner, he is doing the air-symphony. “Airing” is the self-promise of all the notes matching up, a fantasy of mastery we afford ourselves. Guitar Hero and Rock Band‘s commericalization of such intuition provides the nth death of punk.