One of my favorite cultural phenomena of 2006 was YouTube--I had no qualms about jumping on the bandwagon of linking to music videos, digging up vintage eleki from Japan and homebrewed goofiness from China.

However, the most interesting musical use of "web 2.0" I saw last year was the YouTube shredders, amateur guitarists from all over the world who use the site as a way of showing off their hot licks. Often young and often Asian, these six-string otaku look like they've spent years woodshedding in their bedrooms--indeed, the videos are often shot in their bedrooms, creating an interesting dissonance between private practice and public performance. The players are almost always alone and sometimes seem conflicted about exposing themselves, concealing their identities with baseball caps and obscure screen names. This has led to a controversy over the identity of "funtwo," whose blistering version of Pachabel's Canon became one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube. A reporter from the New York Times eventually found the true performer, 23-year-old Korean Jeong-Hyun Lim.

However, in terms of pure enjoyment, my favorite video is by a young Korean living in Malaysia, Zack Kim Yong Woon: the Kuala Lumpur resident does a great version of the theme from Super Mario Brothers. Playing two guitars at once, Zack uses the metal-derived technique of "tapping" or "hammering" the guitar frets, allowing for a degree of polyphony otherwise impossible on guitar. He's not the only guy doing this on the web, but he's got a nice sense of feel and a nice sense of humor--it's just fun to watch and listen to him play:

This video got me thinking about what a great tune the Mario Bros theme is. Its author is famed Nintendo composer Koji Kondo. Would it be safe to call him the first great video game composer? Wikipedia points out the severe technical restrictions imposed on him by the technology of the early game hardware:

Kondo found himself in a totally different environment at Nintendo. Suddenly, he was limited to only four "instruments" (two monophonic pulse channels, a monophonic triangle wave channel which could be used as a bass, and a noise channel used for percussion) due to limitations of the system's sound chip. Though he and Nintendo's technicians eventually discovered a way to add a fifth channel (normally reserved for sound effects), his music was still severely limited on the system.

Viewed in this context, the Mario theme seems almost miraculous to me. Kondo still composes for Nintendo today. And he apparently wears a white lab coat while doing so, which scores major bonus points in my opinion!