“Out of Thin Air” Published in Ethnomusicology

My fieldwork on air guitar has finally materialized into a published article, which I hope is one of many on an infinitely interesting subject. I’m honored to have it appear in the recent issue of Ethnomusicology.

The article is basically about the way U.S. Air Guitar Championships involve people remixing rock music and representing it with their bodies onstage. This combo–remix and choreography–allows them to turn popular music into a controlled substance that they consume in front of a live audience. We’ve become accustomed to the idea of remix in electronic and hip hop genres, but rock has its own remix history. This is part of that history–showing the ways configuring and choreographing media conjures longstanding ideas about identity and music.