Grassroots guitar virtuoso Jeong-hyun Lim
We've known for a while that the internet is fast changing popular culture. Just as today's teenagers don't know what you're on about if you mention A and B sides, so downloading technology appears to spell the demise of the album, that most cherished of artiste's statements. Although record companies are making strenuous efforts to get around it, the net is threatening their hegemony.
Lily Allen and Sandi Thom are regularly cited as stars of the new age thanks to their DIY websites gradually accumulating big audiences. (There have, of course, been dark rumours that such grassroots successes were actually fertilised by stealthy PR activity.)
It's far from clear how the chips will eventually fall, but one thing we might have expected, amid the galaxy of choice available in the new age, is the end of "star" performers. Not yet, it seems.
YouTube, the idle browser's fount of inane distraction, appears to have given birth to a most unexpected mass phenomenon. As reported in today's Independent, the Korean guitarist Jeong-hyun Lim recently uploaded his version of Pachelbel's Canon. Re-arranged as a bonanza of axe pyrotechnics, it's the kind of thing I thought had disappeared with ELP and the Royal Philharmonic's Hooked On Classics records, definitively wiped out by punk rock.
And yet this earnestly charming video, showing a young man hunched studiously over his guitar, head bowed and face mostly concealed by his baseball cap as his fingers fly across the frets, has now been seen more than eight million times. Unlike many word-of-mouth web hits, this one is clearly not fuelled by anyone making a fool of themselves. Yet this self-effacing and sober turn is somehow commanding the kind of mass audience thought to be impossible these days without massive marketing.
The bashful Lim, whose internet handle is FunTwo, is thought to have uploaded the video (to a different site) in order to refine his technique, canvassing picking tips from other players who watch what he's doing. So it's unlikely that he'll be filling stadiums anytime soon.
This leads us to wonder - if an unwitting guitarist looking for playing tips can rise to net-celeb status, have we been missing any similar phenomena? Over to you, vultures.
