EIGHT
months ago a mysterious image showed up on YouTube,
the video-sharing site that now shows more than 100 million videos a day. A
sinewy figure in a swimming-pool-blue T-shirt, his eyes obscured by a beige
baseball cap, was playing electric guitar. Sun poured through the window behind
him; he played in a yellow haze. The video was called simply “guitar”. A black-and-white title card gave the
performer’s
name as funtwo.
A still from the video “guitar” performed by funtwo on YouTube, a video-sharing Web site.
The piece that funtwo
played with mounting dexterity was an exceedingly difficult rock arrangement of
Pachelbel’s
Canon, the composition from the turn of the 18th century known for its solemn chord
progressions and its overexposure at weddings. But this arrangement, attributed
on another title card to JerryC, was anything but
plodding: it required high-level mastery of a singularly demanding maneuver
called sweep-picking.
Over
and over the guitarist’s left hand articulated strings with
barely perceptible
movements, sounding and muting notes almost simultaneously, and playing
complete arpeggios through a single stroke with his right hand. Funtwo’s
accuracy and velocity seemed record-breaking, but his mouth and jawline, to
the extent that they
were visible, looked impassive, with none of the exaggerated grimaces of heavy metal guitar
heroes. The contrast between the soaring bravado of the undertaking and the
reticence of the guitarist gave the 5-minute, 20-second video a gorgeous
solemnity.
Like
a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video drew hordes of seekers
with diverse interests and attitudes. Guitar sites, MySpace
pages and a Polish video site called Smog linked to it, and viewers thundered
to YouTube
to watch it. If individual viewings were shipped records, “guitar”
would have gone gold
almost instantly. Now, with nearly 7.35 million views, and
a spot in the site’s
10 most-viewed videos of all time, funtwo’s
performance would be
platinum many times over. From the perch it’s occupied for months
on YouTube’s “most
discussed” list, it generates a seemingly endless stream of praise (riveting, sick, better than
Hendrix), exegesis, criticism, footnotes, skepticism, anger and awe.
The
most basic comment is a question: Who is this guy?
If
you follow the leads, this Everest of electric-guitar virtuosity, like so many
other online artifacts, turns out to be a portal into a worldwide microculture,
this one involving hundreds of highly stylized solo guitar videos, of which funtwo’s is but the most famous. And though
they seem esoteric, they have surprising implications: for YouTube,
the dissemination of culture, online masquerade and even the future of
classical music.
JOHANN
PACHELBEL, the great one-hit wonder of the baroque period, originally composed
his Canon in D Major for three violins, at least one chord-playing instrument
(like a harpsichord or lute) and at least one bass instrument (like a cello or
bassoon). With its steady walking rhythm, the piece is well suited to
processionals, and the bass line is extremely easy to play, a primer on simple
chords: D, A, B minor, F-sharp minor, G. A sequence of eight chords repeats
about 30 times.
The
exacting part is the canon itself: a counterpoint played over the bass,
originally by the three violins. The first violin plays variation A, then moves
on to B, while the second violin comes in with A. By the time the first violin
gets to C, the second starts in with B, and the third violin comes in with A:
like three people singing “Row, Row, Row Your
Boat”.
With
28 variations, the piece becomes supercharged with complexity only to revert to
a simpler structure as it ends. If you hadn’t heard it a thousand times before, in
the movie “Ordinary People”, in commercials, at all those weddings, it might blow you away.
Last
year Jerry Chang, a Taiwanese guitarist who turns 25 on Thursday, set out to
create a rock version of the song, which he had been listening to since
childhood. It took him two weeks. Others, like Brian Eno, had
done so before him, and some listeners say his arrangement is derivative of one
composed for the video game “Pump It Up”. But one way or
another, his version, “Canon Rock”, rocked.
Once
he had his arrangement on paper, and in his fingers, since
sweeping is above all
a function of motor memory, Mr. Chang decided to publish his work.
In the arena of high-speed
guitar heroics, though, an audio recording is not enough; the manual virtuosity
is almost like a magic trick, and people have to see it to believe it. So he
sat on his bed in front of a video camera, fired up his recorded backing track
and played his grand, devilish rendition of “Canon Rock”.
He then uploaded the video to a Web site he had already set up for his band and waited for a response.
Before
long he was inundated with praise, as well as requests for what are called the “tabs”,
or written music, and the backing track, or digital bass line, which fans of his work
downloaded and ran on their own computers. They then hoisted up their Fenders
and Les Pauls
to test their skills against JerryC’s. One
of these guys was funtwo.
By
following a series of clues on JerryC’s
message board and various “Canon Rock” videos, I was able to trace funtwo’s video to Jeong-Hyun
Lim, a 23-year-old
Korean who taught himself guitar over the course of the last six years. Now
living in
A
close analysis of his playing style and a comparison of his appearance in
person with that of the figure in the video, left little doubt that
Mr. Lim is the elusive funtwo.
Recently
he e-mailed me an account of how he came to make his YouTube
video. His English is excellent, from years spent at
“First time when I saw JerryC’s
“Canon” video, it was so amazing, I thought I might play it,”
he wrote. “So I practiced it by myself using tab and backing track from Jerry’s
homepage.”
On Oct. 23, 2005, he uploaded his video to a Korean music site called Mule. From there an unknown fan
calling himself
guitar90 copied it and posted it on YouTube with the elegant
intro: “this guy iz great!!!”
Repeatedly
newcomers to the comments section on YouTube suggest that the
desktop computer visible on the right side of the video is doing all the
playing, and that funtwo is a fraud. They point out that there is a
small gap in timing between the finger work and the sound of the video. These
complaints invite derision from those in the know. (Funtwo’s use
of a backing track is no
secret, and as for the gap, he says he recorded the audio and video
independently and then matched them inexactly.)
Guitar
fanatics are perplexed: “How the hell does he gets his harmonics to sound like that?”
Some praise specific components of the performance, including the distortion, the power chords
or the “sweet outro”.
Overall a consensus
emerges: This guy iz great.
“I’m shocked at how much you
rock”, one fan said. “Funtwo just pure ownz the
world”, said another. “Somebody just beat JerryC
at his own song”, tinFold44 said. Carrie34 gushed, “funtwo’s version makes me want to hold up
my lighter and *hug*
my inner child! :)”
PACHELBEL’S
CANON, at its essence, dramatizes the pleasure of repetition and imitation. It should come
as no surprise, then, that JerryC and funtwo have
both attracted impersonators. Over the past year, as JerryC’s and funtwo’s videos have been broadly distributed on
every major video-sharing site, hundreds of other guitarists have tried their
hands at JerryC’s
“Canon Rock”. Many copy the original mise-en-scčne:
they sit on beds in what look like the bedrooms of guys who still live with
their parents. They make little effort to disguise their computers. And they
look down, half-hiding behind hats or locks of hair.
Some
imitators have gone further than that. A Malaysian guitarist claiming
erroneously to be funtwo briefly set up a MySpace page,
then shut it down. And this month, in
This
process of influence, imitation and inspiration may bedevil those who despair
at the future of copyright but is heartening to connoisseurs of classical
music. Peter Robles, a composer who also manages classical musicians, points
out that the process of online dissemination “ players watching one another’s
videos, recording their own, multiplies the channels by which musical innovation has always
circulated. Baroque music, after all, was meant to be performed and enjoyed in
private rooms, at close range, where others could observe the musician’s
technique. “That’s how people learned how to play Bach”, Mr. Robles said. “The
music wasn’t written down. You just picked it up from other musicians”.
That
educational imperative is a big part of the “Canon Rock”
phenomenon. When
guitarists upload their renditions, they often ask that viewers be blunt: What
are they doing wrong? How can they improve? When I asked Mr. Lim the reason he
didn’t show his face on his video, he wrote, “Main purpose of
my recording is to
hear the other’s suggestions about my playing.” He
added, “I think play is more significant than appearance. Therefore I want the others to
focus on my fingering and sound. Furthermore I know I’m
not that handsome.”
Online
guitar performances seem to carry a modesty clause, in
the same way that hip-hop comes with a boast. Many of the guitarists, like Mr.
Chang and Mr. Lim, exhibit a kind of anti-showmanship that seems distinctly
Asian. They often praise other musicians, denigrate their own skills and talk
about how much more they have to practice. Sometimes an element of flat-out
abjection even enters into this act, as though the chief reason to play guitar
is to be excoriated by others. As Mr. Lim said, “I am always
thinking that I’m not that good player and must improve more than now.”
Neoclassical
guitar technique has fallen largely out of favor in American popular music. It’s
so demanding that many listeners conclude it has no heart and lacks the primitive charm of
gut-driven punk and post-punk, which introduced minimalist
sounds in a partial corrective to the bloated stylings of
American heavy metal.
In
the YouTube
guitar videos, however, technical accomplishment itself carries a strong
emotional component. Many of the new online guitarists began playing classical
music, violin, piano, even clarinet, as children; they are accustomed to a highly uneven
ratio of practice to praise. Mr. Lim’s fans said they watch his “Canon
Rock” video daily, as it inspires them to work hard. When I watch, I feel moved by Mr. Lim’s
virtuosity to do as he does: find beauty in the speed and accuracy that the new Internet world
demands.
Even
as they burst onto the scene as fully-formed guitar gods, they hang back from
heavy self-promotion. Neither JerryC nor funtwo has
a big recording contract.
At
a moment in pop history when it seems to take a phalanx of staff - producers,
stylists, promoters, handlers, agents - to make a music star, I
asked Mr. Lim about
the huge response to the video he had made in his bedroom. What did he make of
the tens of thousands of YouTube commenters,
most of whom treat him as though he’s the second coming of
Jimi Hendrix?
Mr.
Lim wrote back quickly. “Some said my vibrato is quite
sloppy,” he
replied. “And I agree that so these days I’m doing my best to
improve my vibrato
skill.”