Asian Fury: A Tale of Race, Rock, and Air GuitarAuthor(s): Sydney Hutchinson

Source: Ethnomusicology , Vol. 60, No. 3 (Fall 2016), pp. 411-433

Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.60.3.0411

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 Vol. 60, No. 3 Ethnomusicology Fall 2016

Asian Fury: A Tale of Race, Rock,

and Air Guitar
Sydney Hutchinson / Syracuse University

Abstract. Attending to race has become essential in ethnomusicology at least

since publication of Music and the Racial Imagination (2000). And what sort
of musical performance could be more imaginary than air guitar? Compet-
itive air guitarists realized long before scholars that their art form provided
an ideal means by which to contest the overwhelming whiteness of rock and
electric guitar, sometimes extending their critique to include gender as well.
Asian and Asian American competitors in particular used their one-­minute
stage performances to comment ironically on the emasculation of Asian males
and the infantilization of Asian females through the construct of “Asian fury.”
Based on field research in Germany, Finland, and the United States since 2009,
this article argues that air guitar performance has helped certain audiences to
reimagine the linkages between race and rock.

A ttending to race has become essential in ethnomusicology at least since

publication of Radano and Bohlman’s Music and the Racial Imagination
in 2000. And what sort of musical performance could be more imaginary than
air guitar? Besides being a time-­honored way through which fans relate to and
even come to embody rock music, air guitar also provides an ideal lens through
which to view the role of the body in musical performance, precisely because the
physical presence of a musical instrument has been removed from the picture.
Staged, competitive air guitar focuses both performers’ and viewers’ attention
on bodily attributes including gender and race, as well as on all those aspects
of musical performance that are not part of sound production yet are equally
meaningful: facial expression, attire, and bodily movement among them.
Competitive air guitarists realized long before scholars that their art form
provided an ideal means by which to contest the overwhelming whiteness of

© 2016 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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 412  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

rock and electric guitar, sometimes extending their critique to include gender
as well. Asian American competitors in particular have used their one-­minute
stage performances to comment ironically on the racialization and gendering
of rock music. Not only have they air guitared their way to gold along the way,
but they have even contributed theoretical tools for understanding the intersec-
tionality of race and gender in rock performance. As “complicitous critiques” or
“counter-­Orientalisms,” to use Dorinne Kondo’s (1997) term, these performances
contest the emasculation of Asian males and the infantilization of Asian females
through the construct of “Asian fury.” In this article, I explain how competitive
air guitar has created space for such interventions, explore the racialization of
rock, describe how Asian fury is performed, and consider what effects it might
have. By analysing the words and performances of Asian American air guitarists,
I show how their efforts are an effective means of bodily critique that draws on
earlier expressions of Asian American anger, connects with other contemporary
forms of virtual performance, and ultimately offers a way to re-­envision what
rock is, who it represents, and who is authorized to represent it.

Air Guitar Beginnings

To understand how air guitar might play a role in dismantling the long-
standing bonds linking rock music, whiteness, and hegemonic masculinity, it
is first necessary to know something about what air guitar competition actually
is and does.
As the simple and unreflective practice of miming the movements of rock
guitarists while listening to their music, air guitar’s beginnings are “still in the
ethnomusicological darkness” (Sweep 2009). Those of the Air Guitar World
Championships (AGWC) are not. They were initiated in 1996 by a group of crazy
dreamers in Oulu, Finland, as a side event to the city’s large music video festival.
Co-­founder Tappo Launonen explains that while they originally intended to
make it a national championship, just one in a long line-­up of wacky Finnish
summer competitions from the wife-­carrying contest to the mobile phone toss
(both of which, incidentally, started in the same year), they quickly realized that
there was no world competition for the activity and changed the name. Launonen
justified the name change by noting that even in the first year they had “one guy
from Sweden, and I think there was . . . a French guy who was studying in Oulu
at the time or something like that. So it was a world championship” (Interview,
2009). While the champions in the first few years were all Finns, things quickly
changed as the competition began to attract international attention and even
financial support from the city government, when it realized that the champion-
ship was the event that brought the most attention to Oulu on a yearly basis. In
fact, each year a reception for visiting air guitarists is now held in the city hall

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  413

(Figure 1, below) and news coverage of the event appears in a dizzying array of
languages all over the globe.
I attended the German national and world air guitar championships in 2009,
and I went on to organize two citywide competitions in Syracuse, New York, in
2011 and 2012. In these, I followed the format of the AGWC, which has remained
consistent since its inception. Competitors reach the Finnish finals in two ways:
by becoming national champions, in which case national committees typically
pay for them to compete in Oulu, or by paying their own way and triumphing
in the famed Dark Horse rounds, held in an Oulu bar on the previous night.
The finals themselves take place on the town square in front of an audience
of thousands and consist of two rounds. In the first, the air guitarists strive
to demonstrate their technique, stage presence, and “airness” in a one-­minute
performance to a song of their choice. In the second, competitors must show
their skills by improvising a routine to a one-­minute song selected by committee
beforehand. Scores are awarded from 4.0 to 6.0 by a panel of expert judges, as
in Olympic figure skating. At the end, all join together in an ebullient air-­off to
“Rockin’ in the Free World” (at international venues like Oulu), or “Freebird” (in
the US regional and national competitions). Additional activities surrounding
the Oulu finals include the High Altitude Training Camp, in which air guitarists
study improvisation, choreography, stage technique, and more with a group of
theatre experts and previous champs (Figure 2), and the World Peace Parade
through downtown Oulu just before the final round in the town’s market square

Figure 1. Air guitarists convene inside the Oulu City Hall, 2009.
(Photo by the author)

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 414  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

Figure 2. Air guitarists hone their skills at the High Altitude Training
Camp in Oulu, 2009. (Photo by the author)

(Figure 3). Participants also join together for informal drinking, sweating in
saunas, and other festivities in what for some has become an annual ritual.
While I focus my attention here on elite air guitarists, those who compete
at a high level, one of the attractions for participants is that air guitar is at least
potentially a participatory performance genre in which any fan can participate.
In this it is similar to games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, which Kiri Miller
has described as participatory genres that “let players put the performance back
into recorded music, reanimating it with their physical engagement and adrena-
line” (2012:15).1 Miller constructs a kind of spectrum of such genres, running
from mimetic performance to playing along with recordings to learning by ear
from sound recordings, and she includes air guitar as an example of mimetic
performance (2012:13). She finds that “schizophonic performances” (ibid.) like
these are important because they allow significant numbers of people to par-
ticipate in a kind of musical performance in which technological mediation is
foregrounded. As I will show, the schizophonia of air guitar not only encourages
participation but also creates the possibility for critique by separating rock from
the bodies that have typically performed it.

Air Values
Central to the events of the Oulu competition and its affiliates throughout
the world are several components of the air ideology originally outlined by

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  415

Figure 3. Competitors in the Air Guitar World Championships

parade through downtown Oulu before taking the stage, 2009 (Photo
by the author)

the Finnish founders: pacifism, equality, and “airness.” The first is an official
part of competition. According to the Air Guitar World Championships’ web
page, “Ever since the beginning the Championships were founded on a peace
ideology: a person playing the Air Guitar cannot simultaneously be up to any
mischief, and after playing mischief just does not seem like such a good idea
anymore.” Launonen explains that the initial slogan promoting the competition
was, “’Join the Air Guitar Forces.’ Air guitar forces [were] kind of like peace
keeping forces, against all the rude activities in the world [because], when you
carry an air guitar, you cannot carry a rifle” (Interview, 2009). This ideology
is incarnated in the Air Guitar World Peace Parade through downtown Oulu,
seen in Figure 3, above; the Air Guitar Declaration of Peace that opens the final
round; and in the aforementioned traditional end to air guitar competitions,
which US organizer Nat Hays sees as the “true moment” of togetherness and
the “most brilliant” aspect of the Finnish creators’ vision (Interview, 2009).
The second component of air ideology, air guitar’s potential to serve as a
great equalizer, is also emphasized in many accounts. For instance, on its organi-
zational MySpace page, Air Guitar Mexico reports, “When practicing Air Guitar,
all people are equal, no matter their race, gender, age, socioeconomic level or
sexual orientation” (my translation). This cosmopolitan and yet participatory
ethos attracts many competitors, some of whom see air guitar as a positive form
of globalization. This idealistic vision matches some rock fans’ perceptions of

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 416  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

the music bringing people together, especially in festivals like Woodstock. So

Brazilian champion Fausto Carraro states, “Air guitar is the real globalizing
system. . . . [P]eople from all countries, from all continents together” (Interview,
2009). Former US world champion Andrew “William Ocean” Litz adds, “I’ve
never met anybody that I didn’t like at an air guitar competition” (Interview,
2009).
Last, but not least, is “airness,” a term meant to pinpoint some of those inef-
fable qualities that transform a competent performance into a truly great one. US
Air Guitar, the organization responsible for coordinating competitions across the
United States, defines airness as “the extent to which a performance transcends
the imitation of a real guitar and becomes an art form in and of itself ” (US Air
Guitar 2016).2 Performers who have airness really feel the music and are able to
communicate their enthusiasm for it through bodily acts and facial expressions;
they are able to demonstrate their knowledge of rock music while commenting
on rock history, often ironically; they are able to balance their sincere love for
the music and its excesses with respect for the act of musical performance, as
well as a consciousness of the inherent silliness of the whole endeavour. All
three aspects of air ideology (pacifistic unity, democratic inclusion, and ironic
stagecraft) work together to make the air guitar stage a space of inclusion—at
least for some people, some of the time.

Race and Rock

So, who exactly is included and who is excluded in air guitar? And how does
this compare with the inclusions and exclusions of what air guitar performer/
philosopher Dan Crane, aka Björn Türoque, calls the “there guitar” (2006:282)—
the physical electric guitar in actual rock performance?
Steve Waksmann has written insightfully about how the electric guitar was
consolidated as an overwhelmingly white male instrument (Waksman 1999:13).
By the mid-­1960s star guitarists were becoming “culture heroes” and fans saw the
instrument as a blend of “’primitive’ simplicity with ‘technological’ complexity,”
with a clear racial subtext (ibid.:2–3). Electric guitar performance thus hinged
on “countercultural desires . . . [for] the transference of racial and sexual identity
between African-­American and white men”—men being a key word here (ibid.:
4). The intermingling of masculinity, race, and authenticity can be seen in Jimi
Hendrix’s performances. Waksmann describes how the physicality of Hendrix’s
playing was praised as a representation of his “authentic” nature because of his
blackness; conversely, black audiences criticized Hendrix for playing into white
stereotypes. Such examples show, he says, how “the instrument is used to invest
the body of the performer with meaning, to confer upon it a unique identity
whose authentic, natural appearance works to conceal its reliance upon artifice

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  417

and technology” (ibid.:5).3 In air guitar performance, the absence of the phys-
ical instrument serves to put even more attention on the body: this ridiculous
lacuna forces performers and audiences alike to reflect upon the theatricality,
even artificiality, of rock’s gendered and racialized moves.
The centrality of electric guitar is one important reason for what one might
describe as the blinding whiteness of rock since the 1960s, and later of air gui-
tar, but it is not the only one. The participation of non-­white, non-­male, and
(openly) non-­heterosexual performers in the genre—on any instrument—has
been negligible, in spite of rock’s roots in black musics (see e.g., Auslander
2006:31). One reason is that the music industry itself was structured around
and by racial segregation and class since its beginnings, so that in the 1950s,
Billboard’s mainly white “Hot 100” list was separate from the “Rhythm and
Blues” and “Country and Western” lists, which by then had replaced analogous
“Race” and “Hillbilly” categories (Shank: 2001:261). If one looks at industry
categories used today, one can see that little has changed: on Billboard charts,
pop and rock categories can basically be read as white; “hillbilly” records are
now “country,” and “race” records have transformed into “R&B/Hip hop” and
“Latin.” Non-­white rock performers continue to be an often invisible minority,
and few non-­white musicians are played on rock radio stations.
The whiteness of the electric guitar and of rock in general has clear implica-
tions for the race dynamics of air guitar: air guitar competitors, too, are white by a
large majority. But important exceptions have occurred, particularly with regard
to the appearance of national competitions outside of Europe and Anglophone
North America, including in Mexico, Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, United Arab
Emirates, and Japan. But over the past decade the most successful interventions
at challenging the racialization of rock performance have been made by Asian
and Asian American competitors, if by “success” we mean the acceptance of peers
and the attainment of high honors. These success stories include Japanese Yosuke
“Dainoji” Ochi, comedian and 2006 and 2007 world champion (that country
has also produced several other top finishers), 2014 Japanese champion Nanami
“Seven Seas” Nagura, and Asian Americans like C-­Diddy (world champion,
2003), Sonyk-­Rok (first in 2004 world championships, briefly), Fatima “The
Rockness Monster” Hoang (2005 US national and multiyear regional champion),
Janice “Bride of Rock” Gomez (2010 LA regional champion), and Dave “G Tso
Money” Chen (who represented Taiwan in the 2014 world championships).
Wendy Hsu has written extensively about Asian American musicians in
indie rock.4 She notes that while earlier performers were sidelined and seldom
visible—like Filipino-­American guitarist Joey Santiago of the Pixies, Japanese-­
American guitarist James Iha of Smashing Pumpkins, and Korean-­American
multi-­instrumentalist Mike Park of Skankin’ Pickle—more recent performers
have taken center stage, as has the half Korean lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs,

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 418  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

Karen O (Hsu 2009:185). The ways these performers “obscure, disguise, or play
with” Asian American identities is an ambivalent strategy of de-­essentialization
that resonates with José Muñoz’s concept of disidentification, writes Hsu
(2010:14). The rock musicians Hsu studies often talk or perform around the
idea of Asian Americanness, rather than confronting identity questions head-­on
(ibid.:12). In fact, the whiteness of rock might have made performing this genre
seem an assimilationist move (especially since Asian Americans have typically
been portrayed as following an assimilationist trajectory; see Su 2014). But the
rebelliousness of rock and the oppositional stance of subgenres like metal and
hardcore, which most air guitar performers choose over indie rock, shows these
performances in a different light. While the de-­essentializing strategy can at
times be effective, at other times—and in other genres of performance—a more
confrontational stance may become necessary.

Asian Fury
As I will show, strategies of confrontation and de-­essentialization have both
been employed in air guitar competition. But the earliest Asian American air
guitar champion’s use of a unique theoretical construct and aesthetic he terms
“Asian fury” continues to affect all competitors of Asian descent, whether they
accept or reject it—and, in both cases, these performers use extreme bodily
techniques to challenge stereotypes of Asianness. Asian American air guitarists’
performance choices partly reflect the bodily comportment of the subgenres
with which they align themselves: while the indie rock Hsu describes is generally
seen as more “bookish and nerdy” than “body-­centered” hard rock (Wilson in
Hsu 2010:38), the air guitar stage already favors hard over indie, and thus the
bodily over the cerebral. But such choices also have to do with the individual
histories, prior performance experiences, and varied viewpoints of the artists
on stage.
The chain of Asian American air victories began in 2003, the first year the
United States held national championships. The winner that year was C-­Diddy,
stage name of Korean-­American actor and Cornell graduate David Jung. His
journey to the world championship in Finland, alongside fellow American,
journalist, and arch-­rival, Dan “Björn Türoque” Crane, is the subject of the 2006
feature-­length documentary Air Guitar Nation. C-­Diddy’s final performance in
Oulu won him the world title, and stands as a classic in the annals of air guitar.5
C-­Diddy’s landmark performance has much to say about genre, gender,
race, and irony. Like other winning routines, this one combines an ironic exag-
geration of rock conventions with heart-­felt tribute. In the words of Diddy’s
air rival, Björn Türoque, air guitar competition is “a joke that you take really
seriously” (Interview, 2009). The inherent irony in the very concept of having a

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  419

worldwide competition in playing a non-­existent instrument is part of the appeal,

especially among a generation characterized in part by constant ironic distance.
C-­Diddy becomes an “authentic” rock star through his expert duplication of
rock conventions, finger technique, and stance, even as his costuming and facial
expressions demonstrate his ironic distance from them. Air guitar critiques
heavy metal performance in particular through this practice, since as Walser
has noted, its lack of ironic distance regarding its ambiguous representations of
gender (for instance, coupling androgyny with patriarchal premises) has been
responsible for its scorning by rock critics (1993:124). Like many rock critics,
air guitarists and their judges also favor performers who play self-­consciously
with rock imagery and history over ahistorical and overly sincere performances
(see Straw 1990:103). In this way, what we might term “airony” gives educated,
middle-­class adults a way to participate in the music they love without losing
credibility among their intellectual peers.
But what about race? Here, as elsewhere, it cannot be understood apart
from gender, as both are clearly written on the body and read through bodily
performances. Jung has explained that his stage name stands for “Chink Daddy,”
and the character embodies “Asian fury,” a construct intended as a “parody of
the emasculation of the Asian male” (in Crane 2006:29–30). The combination
of Asian feminine stereotypes in his costume with the ultimate masculine act of
virtuoso electric guitar playing not only embodies the air guitar ideal of irony
but also constitutes an intervention into the racialization of rock that might be
characterized as a counter-­Orientalism, to use a term coined by anthropologist
Dorinne Kondo. To Kondo, counter-­Orientalisms are ways of subversively mobi-
lizing Orientalist stereotypes6 through performance (see Wong 2004:15–16),
and they are one type of “complicitous critique.” In this term, Kondo draws on
Linda Hutcheon’s notion of postmodern parody, in which whatever is said (or in
this case, performed) is said with scare quotes around it, so that such parodies
are an ironic or even “ironic” mode of communication (Hutcheon 1989:1–2).
In a complicitously critical performance, then, conventions are simultaneously
reinforced and undermined, with the effect that their naturalness is questioned.
That is exactly what Asian fury does through air guitar with regards to com-
monplace notions of Asianness. In this way Asian fury works against what Grace
Wang calls “the fantasy of color-­blind intimacy,” a narrative common in music
criticism that asserts that listeners must recognize the individuality of performers
without noticing their racial, ethnic, or class positions, and which awkwardly
coexists with discourses of multiculturalist celebrations of diversity (2014:15).
Jung’s Asian fury builds on earlier iterations of Asian American anger
in pop culture. Examples might include 1990s zines by Asian Americans like
Exoticize This!, Bamboo Girl, and Giant Robot (Bacareza Balance 2012:141), Lela
Lee’s comic named “Angry Little Asian Girl,” Phil Yu’s blog “Angry Asian Man,”

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 420  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

websites like Angry Asian Guy and Big Bad Chinese Mama, Tak Toyoshima’s
on-­line comic strip titled Secret Asian Man (Oren 2005:246–35), or any number
of Asian American comedians and humorists. For instance, Lee created her
comic in 1996 to respond to racist and sexist mainstream depictions of women of
color and to destabilize stereotypes, like those of Asians as perpetual foreigners
and Asian American women as demure (Oh 2014:40). Similarly, Yu chose the
name for the blog and news aggregator he founded in 2001 in order to counter
stereotypes of Asian passivity and indifference (K. Ng 2014:41). Meanwhile,
humorists like Sandra Tsing Loh and Gennifer Hirano use “aggressive” humor
to counter the objectification of Asian women’s bodies (Seethaler 2012:121).
Going back further in time, one might trace the roots of all this “fury” to the
ongoing trauma of historical injustices against Asian American populations,
from the Chinese Exclusion Acts to the Japanese American internment camps
and on up to the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982 and the targeting of Asian
American businesses during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising.
Jung’s parody of Western ideas of Asian masculinity comes through loud
and clear in his outfit (see Figure 4, below), a red kimono worn open over flow-
ered leggings and a Hello Kitty breastplate, the sash tied kung fu-­movie-­style
around his forehead, along with over-­the-­top metalhead facial expressions like
his signature tongue flutter. But his technical expertise is equally clear from
the opening notes, as Jung catches every drum hit and power chord with his
choreographic moves, his fingers flashing lightning-­fast along the imaginary
fretboard, his screaming mouth precisely timed to mimic the ear-­grabbing,
high-­pitched slide along the string. His stage presence, too, cannot be faulted:
he has the audience from his opening nod and sneer; he knows he will win the
doubters over when he looks them piercingly in the eyes and leans over them
during his monitor stand; he counts on their participation when he cups his
hand over his ear and requests their screams. Jung’s confidence, humor, tech-
nique, knowledge, and Asian fury blend together in an alchemical reaction that
can only result in airness. For C-­Diddy, his airness was born specifically out
of the “racially, culturally, and socially repressed life” he experienced as “the
only Asian-­American” in the town where he grew up, and the only metal fan
in an “uptight prep school where everyone listened to the Grateful Dead.” He
continues, “This combination yielded the right combustible mixture of passion,
anxiety, repression, shame, anger, desperation, exhilaration and ultimately joy”
(Jung 2015a).
Although Jung retired from competition, he continued to comment on
rock and Asianness in later activities. For instance, he posted a video of himself
playing air guitar to the famous Youtube rendition of the Pachelbel canon by a
“mysterious” electric guitar virtuoso known as “Funtwo” (see Heffernan 2006;
C-­Diddy n.d.). Long the subject of internet speculation, Funtwo’s real identity

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  421

Figure 4. C-Diddy (David Jung) on stage in 2003, immortalized in a trading card.

All trading cards printed in this article were designed by 2013 National Champion,
Lt. Facemelter (Courtesy U.S. Air Guitar)

was at last revealed as that of South Korean 23-­year-­old Jeong-­Hyun Lim in a

2006 New York Times article (Hefferman 2006). C-­Diddy’s parody/tribute begins
with an overexposed shot of Diddy seated on a bed, his hair hiding his face,
much like the original—though Diddy is outfitted once again in his champion-
ship attire, with the addition of a C-­Diddy original belt buckle Heffernan 2006).
Soon, however, the camera focuses on shots of Jung’s face, showing once again
that he is the master of the air grimace, and on Hello Kitty’s bobbing head.
As a commentary on Funtwo’s video, Jung’s performance was again mas-
terful. Lim was apparently a classical music fan who took one month of guitar
lessons and taught himself the rest; the piece he chose to play, “Canon Rock,” was
an arrangement by Taiwanese guitarist Jerry Chang, who originally published
it online the year previously. The Times article on the phenomenon notes how
modest both Chang and Lim were about their astonishing skills, stating that the
guitarists exhibited an “anti-­showmanship that seems distinctly Asian” (Heffer-
nan 2006); the focus on their “neo-­classical technique” also conforms to Asian
stereotypes and downplays the fact that the guys really do rock.7 The extremes
to which Jung goes to entertain, to demonstrate his feel for rock music, and to
exhibit Asian fury thus seems an appropriate response to the moldy tropes that

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 422  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

continue to circulate in articles like Heffernan’s. Indeed, when I asked C-­Diddy

to comment on why he chose to record this video, he stated simply, “Moral
obligation” (Jung 2015b).
Tracing the history of C-­Diddy back further in time, we find that his rise
to the top began with Jung’s stint as an actor/comedian with Chink-­o-­Rama,8 a
stage variety show created by the Indonesian-­Canadian-­American performer
Kate Rigg in collaboration with Jung. Rigg, a Julliard graduate, describes herself
as a “cultural terrorist” who challenges racial and gender stereotypes primarily
through her comedy shows (Krefting 2014:97), which feature titles like “Birth
of a nASIAN,” and her musical duo, “Slanty Eyed Mama.” In Chink-­o-­Rama,
Jung played a character called MC Chink Daddy, who he explains was
conceived to manifest the most extreme stereotypes of Asian-­American men in
one character . . .stereotypes that are deeply deeply deeply resented by all Asian-­
Americans. . . . In the show, Chink Daddy fully inhabited the stereotypes until he
erupts into a volcanic projection of heavy metal (and a little Steven Tyler and Elvis)
masculinity in total defiance and destruction of the stereotypes. We accomplished
this in a sketch by suddenly transforming Chink Daddy . . . to C-­Diddy, a forceful,
raucous front man of a rocking band with gorgeous dancers who celebrate his sex
appeal and confidence. (Jung 2015a)
In that piece, titled “Wok this way,” Jung also premiered some of his air guitar
moves (Yang 2006).
For Hutcheon, parody is a useful feminist strategy because it effectively
politicizes representation and de-­naturalizes gender among other social con-
structs, as we have just seen with Jung’s critique of Asian masculine stereotypes.
An example of Asian fury deployed as a feminist intervention into the air gui-
tar world comes from the work of MiRi Park, a Korean American protégé of
C-­Diddy and former Chink-­o-­Rama dancer who successfully competed on the
world stage a year after Diddy’s win. Park had previously gained notoriety as a
b-­girl in the New York breakdancing world, where she competed under the name
Seoulsonyk; she also has a BFA in dance and choreographs modern dance. Her
air guitar stage name, Sonyk-­ROK, combined her b-­girl moniker with a pun-
ning reference to the Republic of Korea, ROK (Yang 2006). Although she had
little rock knowledge, Sonyk made up for that lack by drawing on her extensive
dance experience in putting together her “Hot For Teacher” routine for the 2004
World Championships. Her moves in that number came from videos of Eddie
Van Halen (for instance, the “air guitar gun,” in which she points the air guitar
neck at the audience machine-­gun style, similar to Dr Feelgood guitarist Wilko
Johnson); from friends (who told her about tapping the guitar neck, employed
at the beginning of the routine); from Jack Black in the film “School of Rock;”
and from general impressions of hair metal bands (Park 2013a).

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  423

Park’s costume, like C-­Diddy’s, projects Asian fury, but this time through a
parody of the hypersexualization and (sometimes) simultaneous infantilization
of Asian women. She entered the stage in a sexy schoolgirl outfit, her long hair
pinned up with a chopstick, removing first her glasses and then the chopstick as
she began to rock. When she did a classic high kick, the audience could see that
she was wearing Hello Kitty underwear beneath the plaid skirt. For Park, Asian
fury is real, and she relates it to her parents’ generation having been raised not
to show emotion, then discouraging their American-­born children from artistic
activities of self-­expression, which produced feelings of rage as well as a need
for release. “Go to late night karaoke in K-­town and you will see Asian fury in
action,” she advises; the same impulse drives young Asian Americans towards
hard rock or hip hop. While Park feels Jung is partially right to describe Asian
fury as a masculine construct, since she relates the traditional reservedness to
Korean mandatory military service and other expectations of men, she also finds
that it applies to women rebelling against stereotypes. Both in breakdancing and
in air guitaring, her attitude became, “Fuck all these guys! I can do this shit!”
This feeling was expressed in part in her decision to wear and reveal the Hello
Kitty underwear (which I will discuss in more detail shortly): it meant, “This is
who you think I am, and I am going to shred it to pieces” (Park 2013a).
The following year, Park continued on this theme when she returned to the
world stage in a costume resembling a hanbok, a traditional Korean women’s
dress, her eyes downcast and her posture demure.9 She then stripped off the
dress to reveal jeans and a t-­shirt with a black tie image on it to deliver a very
technical rock performance. Both routines employed the common conceit of
transformation from shy to powerful, used by both male and female air guitarists,
but with a twist of Asian fury. Outside of air guitar, Park has explored gender
and race in different ways, for example in her creation of stage persona “Stella
Ho,” an Asian woman dressing as a black man dressing as a black woman. She
comments, “I kind of feel like air guitar personas are the male equivalent to
faux drag kings; a way for men to be more hyper-­masculine [in a way] that their
everyday body does not [usually] have the chance to perform” (Park 2013b; see
Figure 5, below). As Stella Ho and as Sonyk-­ROK, Park gives herself permission
to embody an “over-­the-­top fierceness and femininity” that she does not perform
in her everyday life (ibid.).
In contrast to Jung and Park, other Asian American air guitarists have
distanced themselves from the concept of Asian fury. Vietnamese-­American
Fatima “Rockness Monster” Hoang (see Figure 6, below), for instance, concedes
that Asian fury was important in the early days of U.S. air guitar, and in fact he
was himself inspired to compete after watching C-­Diddy’s performance while an
art grad student at Claremont Graduate University (Yang 2006). He also states

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 424  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

Figure 5. Sonyk-ROK (MiRi Park). (Designed by Lt. Facemelter, courtesy U.S. Air
Guitar)

that he and his Asian American colleagues have discussed how their stereotypi-
cally overachieving natures play into their competitiveness on stage. However,
Hoang also contends that “the game has changed” due to the “William Ocean
effect,” Hoang’s term for a pro-­wrestling-­like focus on pure spectacle, which
he ties to the 2007 and 2009 US national champion Andrew “William Ocean”
Litz; he feels that this turn has made Asian fury less relevant in competitive air
guitar (Hoang 2013). In addition, in conversations with his wife, who served as
a kind of coach in his early years of competition, the two decided consciously
to eschew C-­Diddy’s approach because of their fears that Hoang would just
appear as another “funny Asian man;” instead, she advised him to draw on his
“pure energy” and “rock and roll force” (Gomez 2015c). As a result, Hoang’s
performances have tended toward a heartfelt emulation of spectacular rock
conventions like stage-­diving and extreme facial expressions, leading one jour-
nalist to describe his work using terms like “intensity and darkness,” “rage and
aggression” (Yang 2006). While he does, then, display fury, it appears not as an
ironic critique or parody but as a facet of his very self.
Janice Gomez, Hoang’s Filipino-­American wife, herself won the title at
the 2010 LA regionals with a performance titled “Bride of Rock” (see Figure 7,
below) that similarly eschewed any overt references to Asian identities, but which

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 Figure 6. The Rockness Monster (Fatima Hoang). (Designed by Lt. Facemelter, cour-
tesy U.S. Air Guitar)

Figure 7. The Bride of Rock (Janice Gomez). (Designed by Lt. Facemelter, courtesy
U.S. Air Guitar)

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 426  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

stunned judges and audiences with its fearless rock attitude and the sheer shock
value of its final moments. She explains that Asian fury is an idea both “com-
pelling and repelling” to her, possibly because the perspective from which her
performances are constructed derives from her upbringing in Hawaii, a context
in which she was aware of multiple Asian American identities but did not feel
herself to be a “minority.” That awareness came only after she moved to California
for college, experiencing a new culture while taking courses in Asian American
Studies. Her unique brand of “Asian American Hawaiian fury” led her later to
question C-­Diddy’s construct, asking herself, “why can’t I have fury all the time?
And why is that surprising?” (Gomez 2015c). Her air guitar routines, including
the 2010 “Bride of Rock” and the 2013 “Yür Mother,” thus focus on a sense of
difference deriving more from gender than ethnicity; she states: “I choreograph
routines with the notion that the audience will already see me as a woman and
Asian but use the spirit of the chosen song/concert vibe to drive my concept.
When participating in Air Guitar . . . I embedded multiple facets of who I am
and inflated them in my characters” (Gomez 2015b). One way she accomplished
this was to begin her 2010 performance at the US nationals with the blowing of
a conch shell to evoke the traditional beginning to Hawaiian ceremonies. She
was then carried onto the stage in a chair, wearing a bridal costume to meet her
groom, the Rockness Monster, and a bevy of bridesmaids representing the titu-
lar “Bulls on Parade” in the Rage Against the Machine song she chose as a nod
to her residence and the band’s roots in the east side of Los Angeles. She then
underwent a transformation similar to Sonyk-­ROK’s in “Hot for Teacher” as the
song began and the sedate bride defied expectations through her embrace of hard
rock, seeming to say, “Oh, I’m just a bride, or I’m just a wife, but this is what I can
do as well” (Gomez 2015c). The terrifying second-­story stage dive that ended the
routine at the Los Angeles championships that year provided effective punctua-
tion to that statement. While Gomez did not repeat the trust fall at the nationals,
she found another way to play with audience expectations in the second round
of competition, a stage at which many competitors employ a costume switch: “I
came out with a robe, knowing that the audience wanted a ‘reveal’ of sorts. As I
unrobed, I had a ‘tasteful’ full covered dress with tights. When you watch certain
videos in the audience you can hear disappointment” (Gomez 2015a).
Ultimately, Gomez’s performances go beyond Asian fury to express an
anger that is both more universal, in that it relates to many women’s experiences
regardless of ethnicity, and more particular, in that it calls upon her Hawaiian
upbringing and both the “welcoming” and “edginess” that upbringing, in her
view, entails. For Gomez, Asian fury “doesn’t necessarily just exist in air guitar.
It is just how I feel we [Fatima and Janice] go about doing everything” (2015c).
Taiwanese American Dave “G. Tso Money” Chen is another air guitarist who
also initially found Asian fury inspirational and was motivated to compete after

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  427

seeing C-­Diddy’s pioneering work. Yet Chen now worries that Asian fury is just
another kind of tokenism, a “risky move” (his term) in the “fringe society of air
guitar” (Chen 2013). This risk is present precisely because many air guitarists
very much want their competitions to be more diverse and inclusive. So Chen
is left with mixed feelings about how Asian Americans can or should behave on
stage in air guitar competition:
the juvenile attitudes of rock music are mainly associated with white male ado-
lescence, while the rebellious aspect is more universal among different American
subcultures. Publicly pantomiming along with music as a method of expression and
appreciation is a liberating experience that really does help total strangers establish
common ground with one another, whereas white males have an abundance of
positive mainstream representatives to easily overshadow this ridiculous behavior
(Chen 2013).
Chen’s stage name does riff on Asianness in its nod to the popular Chinese
take-­out dish “General Tso’s Chicken;” he replaced the last word with “money”
when contemplating taking on a rapper persona (later abandoned) because he
found it “amusing, culture-­bridging and universally applicable” (Chen 2015).
His competition routines employ no markers or stereotypes of Asianness, but
like Hoang’s and Gomez’s, they are certainly not devoid of fury: rebellion and
rage emerge through the stance, postures, and facial expressions that accompany
his usually hardcore musical selections.
Chen’s assessment of the future of air guitar competition is ultimately hope-
ful: he finds it “definitely more inclusive . . . an increasingly-­diverse range of
talents are always welcome” (e.c. 2014). Hoang, too, offers an optimistic view,
stating that “with the sense of inclusion that air guitar brings, it will be more
diverse in the near future” (e.c. 2013). So far, though, it hasn’t exactly hap-
pened—black and Latino competitors are few and far between on either the
US or world stages. Nonetheless, aside from Asian Americans, Asian competi-
tors—particularly Japanese ones—have attained notable success in world com-
petition. However, while they have also mixed humor with Asian stereotypes in
some of their performances, Asian fury—as a complicitous critique of gendered
and racialized imaginaries—is generally lacking. Nanami “Seven Seas” Nagura’s
first-­place routine in the 2014 world championships employed some tropes
that recall Asian fury, like an outfit resembling a mini-­kimono with obi sash
and martial arts moves. Nagura’s embodiment of ninja masculinity could be
read as a critique of traditional Japanese gender roles. Yet in terms of race and
ethnicity, the lack of irony with which the routine was performed made it seem
more an acceptance of than a challenge to Western views of Japan—not counter-­
Orientalism, but Orientalism itself. Furthermore, respect for the performers’
abilities and knowledge of rock is essential for effective critique—otherwise, it
is too easy to write off the interventions of potentially controversial performers.

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 428  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

Nagura’s guitar technique was deemed less than convincing by many veterans of
the sport, rendering any potential gender interventions less potent than those
of the technically astute Park or Gomez.
I should also note that these performers are intervening in two areas—
race and gender—and these two types of interventions have not always been
equally successful. More and more women have in fact been entering—and
sometimes winning—air guitar competitions since Sonyk-­ROK began. Former
world champion Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeier observed that male:female
ratios reached 1:1 in some cities in the 2013 US Air Guitar competition season.
The environment is generally welcoming to women, more so, Billmeier thinks,
since social networking has become an important part of US air guitaring, par-
ticularly through its Facebook group, which fosters friendly offstage relationships
among competitors (Billmeier 2013). But in the past, tensions have occasionally
arisen. In 2004, Sonyk was prematurely given the world title; in a recount, it was
found that New Zealander, The Tarkness, had beat her by a half point. It was
decided that they would share first place. Some observers were outraged by the
decision, expressing the opinion that Sonyk had only finished so well because
of her use of sex appeal. Others countered that men wearing tight costumes
were not doing anything different—sex was what it was all about, anyway (van
Meer 2009). While Sonyk-­ROK was fine with the outcome and enjoyed both the
process and the Tarkness’s performance (Park 2013b), the fact that the debate
occurred at all reveals a double standard that is eroding but still present. At that
time, Sonyk’s commentary on gendered difference was apparently less palatable
than were her interventions into rock’s racializations.
Some might argue that the presence, absence, or relative success of racial or
ethnic minorities in air guitar doesn’t really matter much. After all, as Billmeier
stated in his speech to participants in 2009’s High Altitude Training Camp, “if
you do really good, keep in mind that this is just air guitar. You’re not totally
awesome because you just did really good in air guitar.” Similarly, racism will
not be erased10 simply because air guitar competitions become more diverse. At
the same time, visualizing diverse performers on the rock stage through these
venues could very well lead to broader change. Park explains, “If you look more
opposite than what people expect you to look like, it’s more of a thrill for the
audience member.” As examples, she cites not only the many Asian American
champions, but also Seth “Shreddy Mercury” Liebowitz with his “Jew-­fro” and
skinny, pasty white teenager Matt “Airistotle” Burns, both of whom also explode
preconceptions of what rockers should look like (Park 2013b); and she feels that
Asian Americans have been successful precisely because of this surprise factor.
As Park says: “No one expects us to be able to rock out, so we have the element
of surprise on our side” (in Yang 2006).

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  429

I should note that Asian fury is not limited to air guitar. Other instances of
Asian fury in musical performance can, for instance, be observed in the names
of rock groups, such as The Chinkees and The Slants. But it seems to be in air
guitar that Asian fury gained not only its name but also conceptual cohesion—
perhaps because of the very absence of the electric guitar and all it symbolizes,
and the resultant focus on the body, as well as air guitarists’ insistence on their
art’s potential for building bridges and fomenting peace. And these interven-
tions are needed. Asian fury takes advantage of the racialized and sexualized
meanings of electric guitar that Waksmann has so clearly described. Perhaps
these performers are trying to appropriate its power much as white performers
had earlier done—but in doing so for groups often stereotyped as overly cerebral
and asexual (from Asian Americans to Jews to white nerds), their performances
have profoundly different results. Chen is right to point out the riskiness of such
a move, but perhaps it is still necessary before a more balanced and nuanced
view of Asian American identities and diversity can be achieved. And beyond
that, C-­Diddy himself explains, as air guitar expresses one’s joy in music, Asian
fury expresses one’s defiance, “and what is more rock and roll than defiance?”
(Jung 2015a).

Goodbye, Hello Kitty?

In concluding, I want to return to the Hello Kitty figure that was employed
in the ways both C-­Diddy and Sonyk-­ROK costumed their Asian fury. Could a
more loaded symbol possibly have been found? The cutesy cat, beloved by many
little girls in Japan and abroad, is also embraced by the trendy teenage “Hara-
juku” girls in Tokyo, in part for reasons of nostalgia, since it first rose to market
dominance in the 1980s (B. Ng [2001]:4). In the US and other Western countries,
Hello Kitty is a symbol of a vaguely Asian pop culture; in Asia outside Japan,
she is read as distinctly Japanese (ibid.: 8). Ironically, in Japan she represents a
fascination with the exotic West: according to Sanrio, her home company, Kitty
was born in London, loves apple pie, badminton, and tennis (ibid.: 5); in fact,
Sanrio even gave her the surname “White.” Hello Kitty therefore embodies not
only the Orientalist gaze from West to East, but also the Occidentalist gaze of
the East upon the West. Asian American air guitarists deploy the cat from the
grey area in between and around Kitty’s whiteness.
Hello Kitty also has clearly gendered meanings as an embodiment of inno-
cent yet stereotypical girlhood—as well as of a postmodern parody of feminist
resistance. She has been used by the feminist zine Mamasita as what Adela
Licona calls a symbol of “resistance to the historical silencing of women,” adding
a mouth to her formerly mouthless, emotionless face that allows her to express

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 430  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

how “pissed” she really is (Licona 2005:120). Chink-­O-­Rama director Kate Rigg
rapped about Hello Kitty in her show, and MiRi Park explained that “She’s a
symbol of the Asian female stereotype that we’re sort of turning on its head”
(Park 2013b). Christine Yano astutely points out that the Japanese aesthetic of
kawaii or cuteness found in Hello Kitty products winkingly references various
feminine subject positions, “from innocent schoolgirl to Lolita sexuality and
beyond” (2009:686); all sorts of women can therefore use her as a “shorthand for
irony, humor, girl power—and sometimes, but not always, Japan” (Yano 2013:8).
When Korean American air guitarists allow the cat to peep out from behind a
red kimono or underneath a schoolgirl skirt, they invite their audiences to join
them in disidentifying with Kitty White’s subordinate position, her girliness and
her racial/ethnic ambiguities, as stand-­in both for an undifferentiated East Asia
in the West and for a white Westernness in the East. Through her deployment
in air guitar, Hello Kitty becomes an unwitting participant in Asian fury.
What lasting effects, if any, do performances of Asian fury have? Deborah
Wong believes that music has “the potential to compel social change by blur-
ring the lines between political and intellectual response” (2004:4). Tasha Oren,
following on the work of Anne AnLin Cheng, sees pop cultural expressions of
Asian American anger as an instance of “transformation from grief to grievance”
that creates the possibility for acknowledging and speaking out against past and
present injustices (2005:339). Expressions of Asian fury in air guitar can be seen
as another way in which grievance has been inserted into pop culture. Politi-
cally, intellectually, and aesthetically compelling, Asian American air guitarists’
stagings of rock are no less likely to incite change than the socially conscious
jazz and hiphop performances Wong examined or the comic strips that figure
in Oren’s analysis (though perhaps no more so either). They are certainly as
well-­thought-­out, as theoretically grounded, and as historically informed as any
music performances I have seen. So if “just being there” was enough for the artists
Wong interviewed, if we agree with her that mere presence was sufficient to at
least begin to change the music industry, and if we concur with Oren that Asian
American film and comic strips are a valid way of contesting the erasure and/
or distortion of Asian American experiences in mainstream American cultural
production, then the very fact that these performers showed up on regional,
national, and international stages was already significant. The fact that they won,
that fellow rock fans found them not only convincing as rockers, but superior
to all others in their bodily presentation of rock (with all its racial and gendered
baggage), is still more so.
The conversion of C-­Diddy’s ironic performance into the quintessence of
air guitar seems to show that, at least for some rock fans, the linkage between
rock and whiteness, and the notion that Asians can’t rock, has been weakened
or changed. “If we regard these performers’ efforts as pedagogical rather than

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 Hutchinson: Asian Fury  431

appropriating,” Wong says of Asian American rappers and jazz musicians, “we
can see anger, interrogation, coalition, action, revolution, in motion” (2004:89).
Indeed, through air guitarists’ windmilling arms, knee falls, stage dives, pel-
vic thrusts, fluttering tongues, horned salutes, and wide-­eyed, open-­mouthed
expressions of rock euphoria—not to mention the Hello Kitty breastplates and
panties, which ironically invoke the mouthless cat during equally unvoiced
performances—air guitarists teach audiences about their fury and the changes
it might bring. Just by being there, they create alternative images of what rock
stars could look like, and by doing so, it is not inconceivable that they may yet
have a greater effect on rock and popular music performance in general. Bet-
ter than “Je suis Charlie,” perhaps we can join instead in C-­Diddy’s refrain and
declare, “We are all Asian Furious” (Jung 2015a).

Notes
1. In fact, there is a yet more tangible connection between these games and competitive air
guitar, since former US and world champion air guitarists Hot Lixx Hulahan (Craig Billmeier)
actually did the motion capture that animates the background characters in the Rock Band game
(Billmeier 2009).
2. Visit the US Air Guitar web site for information on past and upcoming competitions, http://
usairguitar.com/
3. For a critique of the whiteness of rock in which the guitar does not play a central role, see
Run DMC’s “Kings of Rock” video.
4. Asian Americans in other genres face similar obstacles. Deborah Wong (2000) discusses
how Asian American rappers and jazz musicians have often been seen as inauthentic performers
of their chosen genres. Although “Asian American and African American bodies have problematic
relationships,” (57) Wong describes how Asian Americans have long utilized and transformed Afri-
can American musical forms, just as White Americans have themselves borrowed liberally from
African American music and other cultural practices to constitute their own rebellions (Monson
cited in Wong 58). While rock musicians did not figure into her study, the interventions of Asian
American performers of rock music could be read in similar ways, although as I note these readings
are complicated by the assumed whiteness of rock music today. And in fact, while Asian American
rappers and R&B singers have become ever more prevalent and visible (see e.g. http://www.buzzfeed
.com/tanyachen/asian-­american-­musicians-­you-­need-­to-­get-­behind-­right-­now), Asian American
rockers are still relatively few and seem to have garnered less attention, at least from academics.
5. I hope readers will do themselves a favor and watch the film, or else view the performance
I describe online (Joseph C 2014).
6. Kondo builds on Edward Said’s notion of orientalism as a Western view or depiction of an
imagined “East” pervaded by the imperialist attitudes of European colonial powers. While Said’s
orientalism originally referred to often-­sexualized Western depictions of Middle Eastern people,
Kondo effectively reframes it as a way of theorizing stereotypical Western views of East Asia and
its peoples.
7. For incisive analyses of Asian Americans in classical music as well as on YouTube, see Wang
2014. For instance, she notes that Asians in classical music must work either within or against
stereotypes that deny their individuality (66–8), and explains that Asian American pop musicians
use YouTube to “circumvent and, at times, contest a racially stratified U.S. music industry” (104).
Asian American air guitarists are clearly thinking through similar issues in their performances.

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 432  Ethnomusicology, Fall 2016

8. Songs like “Wok This Way” and “Rice Rice Baby” are available at http://www.katerigg.com/
html/chinkorama.html.
9. Park also seems to invoke the Korean female “ghost” or kwisin here, a spirit that returns to
earth to take care of unresolved business (thanks to one of my anonymous reviewers for pointing
out the reference).
10. Or, one might say, “air-­raced.”

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