Amateur by Lasse Gjertsen - A YouTube Review

Modern, quirky and undeniably cool, Lasse Gjertsen's videos are the kind of thing that YouTube was made for. In Amateur, the Norwegian relies once again on the frantic editing style used in his first big YouTube hit, Hyperactive (in which he uses millisecond-long clips of himself making bizarre noises and facial expressions to turn himself into a human beatbox), this time using a drum kit and piano to take the place of bodily functions.

The concept seems simple enough. But it's the execution that has made Amateur such a success. Watching the video, it's hard to know what exactly to compare it to. You could argue that it's a music video - it is, essentially, a video of a man making music. But calling it a music video somehow just isn't enough in an age when music videos are largely just marketing tools to sell pre-existing songs and albums. You could call it a showcase of talent, but that simply makes it sound like a guy with too much time on his hands showing off to millions of people around the world that he's never met, when it somehow comes across as being so much more substantial.

It is, of course, a fantastic display of technical ability, both in terms of editing and musicianship (though Gjertsen claims he couldn't play either piano or drums before making the video - something which is hard to imagine given some of the drum sequences in the video). But what's even better is that Amateur so far has over 7,000,000 hits. SEVEN MILLION. That means that, in just over a year since it was uploaded, more than 16,000 people a day have taken three minutes out of their lives to watch guy in his early 20's with silly hair making music one note at a time, with a camcorder. And he isn't alone - a YouTube search using the terms "Lasse Gjertsen Amateur" brings up page upon page of of video responses to the original, and even a few results from users who liked the video so much that they've (dubiously) uploaded the video themselves.

At the moment, Lasse Gjertsen may seem like something of an Internet phenomenon. In 10 years time, videos with viewcounts as high as 7,000,000 may well be seen as the norm, providing YouTube and other UGC-based websites fulfil their potential to to change the face of video media the world over.