Guitar90
Lim Jeong-hyun, also known by the online alias funtwo, is a South Korean guitarist known for his cover of the piece Canon Rock. The YouTube user with the alias “guitar90″ is not Lim Jeong-hyun, but an unknown person who just happened to upload Lim’s video. This has been cleared up in his latest interviews. Quoting from the video, the interview clarifies, “someone else called guitar90 who grabbed the video and put it on YouTube where it became a sensation”.
Lim Jeong-hyun played and recorded his cover of Canon Rock during 2005. He uploaded his video onto the popular South Korean music website called Mule.co.kr. It was then uploaded to YouTube by a viewer nicknamed “guitar90″, under the title guitar. It was not long before the video gathered popularity and viewers speculated as to who was beneath the baseball cap.
Guitar90′s video is among the twenty most viewed and fifth most “favorited” video in YouTube history with 64,307,881 views and counting. At its peak, the video was the fourth most viewed video on YouTube.
Lim’s cover of Canon Rock has been mentioned on CNN, 20/20, The New York Times, and National Public Radio, in addition to MBC news, CBC Radio, South KBS news, and other South Korean news stations.
Many viewers have speculated and thought of the video as fake because the audio is not synchronized with the video. Lim later stated to The New York Times that this had to do with the fact that “he recorded the audio and video independently and then matched them inexactly.” The performance itself was recorded in two parts, and edited together. An image of a traffic light was used to make the transition.
In addition to playing the work of others, Lim has now started to arrange well-known music by himself. He composed a holiday card to his fans called “Carol Rock (funtwo Is Coming to Town)”, a rock version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”. He also played Dream Theater’s “Overture 1928″, and recently he posted a video of himself performing Antonio Vivaldi’s “Summer” from the Four Seasons, one of Vivaldi’s most famous works.
Lim has expressed no wish to carry on playing as a professional guitarist. However his online fame has allowed him to play to live audiences three times— once for the South Korean ambassador in Washington, DC, then again at the KORUS festival the same year. At the KORUS festival, Lim played improvised, altered versions of the Korean national anthem and the American national anthem. The third time he played was in 2008, the 22 November at the YouTube Live festival where he performed with Joe Satriani, he played first a mix of Canon Rock and Joe’s “Surfing With the Alien” and then “Canon Rock”. In the same interview in which he stated his wish to carry on playing guitar simply as a hobby, he also rated his own playing a modest 50/60 out of 100.
The beginning of the music video for Weezer’s song “Pork and Beans” is set in Lim’s iconic room, with the various members playing their various instruments. The video as a whole contains references to numerous other internet phenomena.
Lim now lives in New Zealand where he is studying computer science at school.
