BALTIMORE—The avant-garde rock community gathered today to honor the David Fair legacy by collectively tuning their instruments to absolutely nothing. Fair, who co-founded the legendary lo-fi band Half Japanese alongside his brother Jad, passed away this week. Musicians worldwide immediately celebrated his anti-instructional ethos by forgetting how to play the G chord.
The Joy of Noise
Fair famous championed a radically untrained approach to the guitar. His seminal essay, "How to Play Guitar," argued that chords were merely a suggestion. "David taught us that three chords were two chords too many," said Barnaby Quill, Senior Analyst of Unsolicited Forecasts at Goldman Sachs. "His teachings single-handedly saved the guitar industry millions of dollars in lessons that nobody wanted to take anyway."
The David Fair legacy continues to inspire bedroom musicians who value enthusiasm over physical dexterity. Local punk guitarist Toby Henderson admitted he has not tuned his Fender Stratocaster since 2014. "I read David's essay and threw my tuner in the trash," Henderson said. "Now my band sounds like a washing machine full of silverware. It is beautiful."
A Beautiful Racket
Music theorists struggled to analyze the impact of Fair's non-traditional techniques. "We usually measure musical influence in scales and arpeggios," said Dr. Thaddeus Mbeki-Ransome, Chair of Applied Hype Studies at the Institute for Trending Phenomena. "But the David Fair legacy is measured in pure, unadulterated enthusiasm. He proved that if you play with enough confidence, nobody can tell you that you are wrong."
At press time, thousands of amateur musicians were reportedly celebrating the David Fair legacy by plugging their guitars directly into lawnmowers.
