SEOUL, South Korea — Lim Jeong-hyun stands alone onstage in a tiny basement rock club, noodling out notes on his guitar as he waits to play the song everyone has come to hear. It’s a young crowd and it’s edging closer, cell-phone cameras held high, getting ready to video the video star.
But first Lim feels the need to reassure them he really is the kid in the famous YouTube video: the wild, virtuoso rock version of Pachelbel’s Canon, 5 minutes and 20 seconds of distorted solo guitar played over a heavy metal backtrack that has been viewed almost 40 million times.
The song is played by a skinny guitarist known only as “funtwo,” sitting stoically in a bedroom, his face hidden in shadows cast by ethereal backlighting and the brim of a baseball cap tugged low over his eyes.
“Don’t be confused because I’m not wearing the hat,” the soft-spoken 23-year-old South Korean tells the crowd. “I am that guy.”
The proof that Lim and funtwo are the same person comes in the playing. Lim’s fingers fly as he coaxes the familiar melody lines from an ESP guitar that, come to think of it, looks just like the guitar in the video.
Then Lim closes the deal. He hammers out power chords and pulls off the incredibly difficult flurry of notes produced by a complex technique called sweep-picking. These are the signatures of “Canon Rock,” a remake of the 18th-century classical piece that has become a cyberspace phenomenon and YouTube’s seventh-most-viewed video.
The rise of “Canon Rock” is a defining story of the digital age. Since being posted in October 2005, the video has been seen roughly as many times as the Eagles have sold a copy of their “Greatest Hits,” the best-selling album ever.
It shows how user-generated Web sites such as YouTube have altered the way musicians learn, teach and exchange ideas, perhaps even changing the way we appreciate music.
Lim believes the video’s popularity lies as much with its look as with the music. “The bad lighting, the cap, the shape of the guitar,” he says, all made a difference.
To a generation for whom reality is that which is digital, Lim seems surprised that anyone would even be interested in how he plays “Canon Rock” live. “I really didn’t think people would be impressed with it live,” he says.
Lim describes the exposure from “Canon Rock” as mostly “a good thing,” although he hardly has tried to turn his online fame into fortune. His answer to cyber stardom was to take a break from his computer science studies at Auckland University in New Zealand and travel the world, mostly as a busker. Carrying a 15-watt amp, he visited 42 countries in 300 days, playing onstage at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles and in public squares from New York to Amsterdam, Netherlands. “Canon Rock” always drew a crowd, he says.
“But I had to put on the hat or they wouldn’t believe it was me,” he says, laughing.
Lim says he had been playing guitar for five years and merely was looking for feedback on his style and technique when he posted his version of Pachelbel’s Canon on a Korean Web site in 2005 (it was copied and uploaded to YouTube two months later). He had been practicing the song for about three weeks. The posted video under the name funtwo was just his second or third take that day.
“I don’t think I’m technically that good a guitar player,” he says. “I watch the clips of others playing Canon and so many people play it better than me. Anyone can do it.”
At first, the assumption was that the mystery of funtwo’s anonymity was driving the video’s appeal. But even after Lim was unmasked in a New York Times story and subsequently exposed to South Korean media overkill, the online hits kept coming.
Lim says he has no plans to become a professional musician. He makes a face as he recalls the drudgery of childhood piano lessons. “It’s something I like to do casually,” he says.
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