YouTube's Star Search

The two clips above are from You Tube.

Many months ago I blogged on the increasing popularity of videos on You Tube and Google Video. I had wondered, at the time, how creative content would develop on this medium, figuring there was still new territory to explore.

Basically, there have been clips from shows that have been willing to look the other way (Daily Show, Colbert Report), people who lip-synch.

But what's more intriguing is the human data-mining that goes on. In particular, I just read about two guys who have played Pachelbel's Canon on a guitar. The first video is "JerryC", which is Jerry Chiang from Taiwan. He took a home video of himself playing sitting on a bed. That was followed up by Jeong-Hyun Lim of Korea, who did his version with a baseball cap covering up most of his face.

What you notice about his version, inspired by JerryC, is little stuff. He, too, is sitting in his bed. There's a mouse on the desk in front of a desktop. There's a spindle of DVDs or CDs in the back.

But what this reminds me of, oddly enough, are lessons I took on the violin many years ago when my parents thought I should take a musical instrument. At the time, most Asian parents in the US favored one of two instruments: the piano or the violin (or both). My brother had piano lessons.

I'll tell you, I didn't care that much for the violin. Essentially you are holding a box of wood underneath your chin.

I knew others who took lessons. While they weren't going to be concert violinists or pianists (given how few people make a living in music), they took it seriously enough that I was often amazed after ten years of lessons that they would drop it to go to college. And some Asian kids were good enough to make a living as professional musicians.

What these two videos show is that an instrument we associate with American rock is still an instrument and people all over the world can pick it up and practice the heck out of it. But more importantly, we would never have heard of either of these musicians had it not been for the viral nature of You Tube.

I read a reddit link to a New York Times article who revealed funtwo's identity (the guy who did the second of the two videos).

Virtuoso guitarists have generally relied on being part of bands (say, Eric Clapton or any number of heavy metal guitarists) to show their skill or perhaps a movie like Rock School.

With a video camera and the ability to upload video and viral word of mouth, people can display their talents on the web, in a kind of Grigory Perelman sort of way (the guy who posted his proof of Poincare's Theorem on the web), and perhaps earnest fans can dig that content right out, and other people can see it.

Not being a guitarist, I can't quite tell you how difficult the pieces that the two guitarists are playing. I'll trust the Times in saying that these are challenging pieces.

Remember when Andy Warhol said that we would all be famous for 15 minutes? His prescient words seem to be more and more true in the You Tube age.