"Pick up my (air) guitar and play..."

Oulu hosts the 13th Air Guitar World Championships this week

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You did not seriously imagine you could escape it, did you?
      We may have been away for the Wife-Carrying or the Swamp Football in July, and we may scandalously have ignored the Sauna World Championships, but some things are sacred.
     
The purpose of the Air Guitar World Championships, being held in Oulu for the 13th time this week, is no more and no less than to promote world peace.
      “According to the ideology of the Air Guitar, wars end, climate change stops and all bad things disappear, if all the people in the world played the Air Guitar. This is why the whole universe is invited to play the Air Guitar for world peace at the end of the competition”, declares the event’s website proudly.
     
The annual event has come a long way since it was introduced in 1996 as a neat joke to complement the Oulu Music Video Festival.
      The championships have long since outgrown the parent happening in renown, especially abroad.
      The Music Video Festival producer Hanna Jakku says pointedly that the World Championships are internationally one of the biggest profile events in Oulu during the year, and perhaps even in Finland as a whole. The event draws in a good many foreign tourists, too.
      The World Championships have also spawned a burgeoning international network of air guitar fans, with 24 countries already on the roster, including Brazil, South Africa, and New Zealand.
     
Friday’s final will feature national champions from 15 countries, including the reigning world champion Ochi Yosuke from Japan, winner in 2006 and 2007.
      The competition is nothing if not fierce, and home advantage counts for little: one has to go back to 2001 to find the last Finnish medallist, when the 2000 World Champion Markus Vainionpää was beaten into second place by Zac "Mr. Magnet" Monro from Britain.
     
You do not have to be in Oulu to witness the spectacle.
      The final on Friday will be streamed live over the Net from the festival’s website, and the organisers hope that as many as possible will avail themselves of the opportunity of getting in a few choice air-licks on their sofa at home.
      After the winners have been declared, the event climaxes in a worldwide air guitar workout to that old warhorse of the genre, Neil Young’s anthem Rockin’ in the Free World.
     
     
The 13th Air Guitar World Championships in Oulu, 20.-22.8.2008. Programme and ticket details from the links below. If you need to ask what “air guitar” is, well, that’s your problem.


Links:
  YouTube: 2007 Silver medallist Guillaume "Moche Pitt" de Tonquédec from France struts his stuff
  13th Air Guitar World Championships
  The AGWC Network
  Air guitar (Wikipedia)

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