Pachelbel, Jerry C et les autres...

Several months ago there was a viral type YouTube Hit that jumped to millions of views overnight. Allegedly there was this kid that called himself Funtwo with his face covered with a baseball pet so that his age was anybody's guess. Soon the news hit the net with a lightning speed that the kid was no more than 12 years old or somethin' (as you can see he 'feels' very young, skiny and small) and before we knew the kid climbed on the fourth place of most viewed videos of all times with 25 million hits. The music he played (or plyed as Funtwo himself spelled it on his clip) was an arrangement by another talented kid Jerry C from Taiwan. I believe it was first Jerry C who posted his rock arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon and it was Funtwo who turned it into an overnight hit due to the mystery behind his personality. Jerry C himself didn't get more than 700K hits which seems hilarious as he was the original creator of the gig and he actually plays the guitar better than all those other ambitious look-alikes of his. Because such look-alikes were really a gazillion. The entire incident gave birth to an entire flock of guitarists of every color and taste (many from the far East like Jerry C), all of them dreaming of turning into another Funtwo. Eventually the mystery was resolved as Funtwo proved to be ten years older than was originally thought! Tough shit... Nevertheless, Funtwo still remains on fourth place in the all time hits YouTube ranks.

A by-product of all this emerged from someone else's idea that gave rise to the video clip shown here. Actually someone called Impeto, a guitarist himself but a video geek as well I suppose, assembled the scores of clips posted to YouTube by all those Funtwo look-alikes and edited one single clip with more than 20 players playing parts of the Canon. A cute idea with a lot of actual work behind. The new creation was called the Ultimate Canon Rock and if you search on this title you get at least a dozen hits... That means that there have been many others imitating Impeto, or was Impeto also imitating someone else, who knows?. I have no clue who was first to come up with the idea... It sounds fun nevertheless.

I guess if you count all these clips and their views together you must get more than 30 Million hits (I didn't feel like counting them, I guess 30M is reasonable). If the arrangement was a commercial record it would have made many platinums over and over again and its creator, Jerry C a multimillionnaire. I wonder though... did Jerry C make a buck or was it all for kicks? Certainly Pachelbel didn't make a penny as he's dead for hundreds of years.

Come to think of it, the whole thing about Web 2.0 and the role each surfer is offered an opportunity to play with sites like Second Life, My Space, YouTube, Digg and the rest is kinda amazing. Who will ever be able to say where this is gonna bring us to. Have no fear though, whatever it might be, it's gonna be a lot better than all we have known twenty years ago, or even ten, where all of us were mere victims in the hands of organized media, the so-called 4th Estate.