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 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 t
he performer's name as funtwo.
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 manoeuvre called sweep-picking.
Like a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video (lasting five minutes and 20 seconds) drew hordes of downloaders. 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 sold discs, '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 has 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, scepticism, anger and awe.
The most basic comment is a question: Who is this guy?
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 - 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 website he had already set up for his band and awaited 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 Seoul, he listens avidly to Bach and Vivaldi, and in 2000 he took a month of guitar lessons. He plays an ESP, an Alfee Custon SEC-28OTC with gold-coloured detailing.
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 Lim is the elusive funtwo.
Recently he e-mailed an account of how he came to make his YouTube video. His English is excellent, from years spent at Auckland University in New Zealand, where he plans to return in March.
"The first time I saw JerryC's 'Canon' video it was so amazing I thought I might play it," he wrote. "So I practised it by myself using the tab and backing track from Jerry's homepage."
On October 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 get 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 is 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, dramatises 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 hand at JerryC's 'Canon Rock'. Many copy the original mise-en-scene: 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.
Even as they burst on to 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 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 comment makers, most of whom treat him as though he's the second coming of Jimi Hendrix?
Lim wrote back quickly. "Some said my vibrato is quite sloppy," he replied. "And I agree with that, so these days I'm doing my best to improve my vibrato skill."
