Lim Jeong-hyun

On October 23, 2005, in a room somewhere in South Korea, Lim Jeong-hyun — a computer science student who had been playing electric guitar for six years and had attended formal lessons for exactly one month — set up a camera, opened his guitar case, and recorded himself playing Canon Rock. The piece was a distorted electric arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D, written by a Taiwanese guitarist who went by the name JerryC. Lim had practiced it. He played it clean, fast, and with the kind of understated authority that comes from genuine absorption of a piece rather than performance of its difficulty. He uploaded the video to a Korean music website. He did not give his real name. He called himself funtwo, as if fame were the last thing he was seeking.

Lim Jeong-hyun was born July 5, 1984, and grew up in South Korea. His path to the guitar was self-directed in the most literal sense: he attended formal lessons for one month in 2000, and the remaining six years of his musical development were entirely his own work — learning by ear, practicing by choice, building a technique that was not supervised by any institutional process. When he was studying computer science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, the guitar came with him; it was an ordinary accompaniment to an ordinary student life, not a professional instrument or a career aspiration. He recorded the Canon Rock video for the same reason most people play music alone in a room: because the piece was there to be played, and he could play it.

A YouTube user named "guitar90" found the video on the Korean site Mule.co.kr and uploaded it to YouTube in early 2006, under the title "guitar," with the introductory comment "this guy iz great!!!" The timing was perfect: YouTube was less than a year old, its algorithms and recommendation systems were still in their infancy, and a genuinely remarkable guitar video had an unimpeded path to the attention of everyone who was using the platform. The video spread. Then it spread faster. Then it became, briefly, one of the most-watched things on the internet.

The mainstream media did not yet have a grammar for internet virality — the concept and the word were both new — but they recognized a news story. CNN covered it. ABC's 20/20 ran a segment. The New York Times wrote about it. National Public Radio discussed it. South Korean broadcasters MBC and KBS covered it as a story of national pride. CBC Radio in Canada covered it. The coverage was universally curious about the same question: who was this person? The identity of funtwo was, for a period, one of the more discussed mysteries in the guitar world — not because it was genuinely obscure, but because the contrast between the anonymous bedroom recording and the scale of the attention it received was so disorienting that the identity of the person at the center of it felt like the only missing piece.

When Lim Jeong-hyun eventually came forward and was identified — by then an unavoidable consequence of the global press coverage — the revelation was, in a way, its own kind of commentary on the viral moment. He was a student. He was modest. He was not, he said, planning a professional career as a guitarist. He had recorded the video because he could play the piece, not because he wanted to be famous. The internet had produced fame from a private act, and the person at the center of it responded with a composure that suggested he understood what the fame actually meant: not very much, relative to the music.

The live performances that followed demonstrated that the video had not been a fluke. He played for the South Korean ambassador in Washington, D.C. He performed at the KORUS festival. On November 22, 2008, he appeared at the YouTube Live festival — a landmark early attempt by the platform to translate its online content into a live event format — and performed alongside Joe Satriani, one of the most technically accomplished rock guitarists of his generation. The pairing was a statement about what Lim's Canon Rock video had established: that the bedroom recording contained real musicianship, not novelty, and that it belonged in the company of professional work.

Canon Rock itself is worth understanding as a piece. JerryC took Pachelbel's canonical bass line — one of the most recognizable harmonic progressions in Western music, the four-bar pattern that has reappeared in hundreds of compositions across three centuries — and built above it a rock guitar solo of considerable technical difficulty, full of fast runs, string bends, harmonics, and the full vocabulary of electric guitar technique developed in the decades since the instrument was invented. Lim's performance of it brought to that material not just technical facility but musicality: the phrasing had shape, the dynamics had logic, the performance did not mistake velocity for expression. That is what made it remarkable then, and what makes it still worth listening to now.

Lim continued to release guitar content online in the years that followed, including a 2012 recording that demonstrated his development as a guitarist and his growing interest in original composition and arrangement. His website, funtwo.net, became the official home for his musical output. He remained, characteristically, more interested in the music than in the narrative surrounding it — a disposition that, given how much narrative had accumulated around a single recording, required some effort to maintain.