Forums / Meme Research

Thanks to Jamie Dubs who gave the link some days ago on IRC, I can present you Merton, who posted a video of himself on Youtube the 11th of March.
In it, he’s doing some improv’ piano on chatroulette:

Aside from the fact that this is an amazing video as well as he wrote that more video would follow soon, it has a somewhat great viral trend going on.

Between March the 11th and March the 16th, It’s got about 930 000 views when I checked it.
We are 2 days later and the views just doubled !

Besides, many articles began to pay tributes to that talented pianist:

- http://www.billboard.com/column/viralvideos/chatroulette-piano-man-merton-sings-for-1004075827.story?tag=hpfeed#/column/viralvideos/chatroulette-piano-man-merton-sings-for-1004075827.story?tag=hpfeed
- http://www.nowpublic.com/strange/mertons-chat-roulette-funny-piano-improv-video-hit-youtube
- http://lebuzzquotidien.blogspot.com/2010/03/merton-piano-chatroulette-video.html (In French)

I’m writing it here because, while this is not a meme yet (No parodies, no trends of freestyler musicians playing on chatroulette and recording themselves), it’s definitely something to keep an eye on.

It nice to see things like this on chat roulette instead of… well pieces of brah’s anatomy that I really don’t what to see…

Ben Folds just did an ODE to MERTON live during one of his concerts!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfamTmY5REw

I subbed him, because I noticed him on animecellos account. Hes awesome ;)

This guy is amazing :)

@dazzledog: Nice find. Posted to the KYM blog. http://blog.knowyourmeme.com/post/464031945/ben-folds-does-chatroulette-piano-improv-live

Plenty of re-posts of the original video, not a whole lot of derivatives yet. I’ve managed to find another though.

And another,

It seems that Youtube complained for some elements present in the original video, so it has been deleted.
Merton reposted a new edited version where some people are blurred (I then suppose that they are the ones who complained here).

Here’s an extract of the description:

For the record, the original video had 4,238,658 Views. At the time of its demise, it was the Top-Rated YouTube Video of All Time. No shit.

More than 4 000 000 views in a short amount of times, that’s really great.

@Tomberry. Wow. As more and more ‘meme’ videos disappear, our job becomes harder. I wonder if we need to start thinking about preservation next. (Time to install DownloadHelper)

I’m kinda worried that people on CR recoconise him (grammar bad, I know) when he does the next video, so that the element of surprise dissapeares, unless he made a couple of them before he putted the first one on YouTube.

This man is a genius. He is an instant favorite in my book.

Here is a interview with Merton from the 23rd of March.

I’m just gonna add his Improv #2

Good stuff.