Ben Folds Tickets – Chat Roulette Becomes Ben Folds’ New Stage

The Internet is for nudity. That’s an unfortunate truth; that the Internet is also for communicating is a far more favorable one.

Chat Roulette, the latest site to strike digital culture like a bombshell, has started to gain mainstream notoriety. You’ve probably already heard of it. It’s in turns entertaining and disturbing, but always simple: Two computer users with web cams access the site. Their cams go on. You type text in a box to chat with the other person. The users are randomly selected, and if you’re not interested in the person the site delivers, you can click “next” and get someone else.

If it was just people typing “ASL” or briefly chatting, the site wouldn’t be as popular as it is. Even though it’s also become a kind of onanist’s paradise—yes, viewing the site may scar your eyes—it’s the constant sense of surprise that has kept users coming back. Flipping through the random pairings, you might meet a computer programmer in New York, or a grocery store clerk in Afghanistan; there might be a sideways sign saying “turn your head like this,” or a couple of masked teenagers; a young man on the toilet, or a middle-aged man wearing—well, we’d rather not say.

But if you’re lucky, you’ll run into someone like Ben Folds or Merton.

Ben Folds is rather well-known; Merton, much less so. Merton is a hoodie-wearing pianist who started recording himself on Chat Roulette a short while back, improvising tunes depending on the people who popped up on the site. “Reclining dude in a white tank top,” he sings at the beginning of a video that became a YouTube sensation. “Leaning his head on his hand / He’s semi-Italian lookin’ / just like his parents had planned.”

Merton’s nimble fingers and even swifter knack for improv earns him more than a few smiles and peace signs. A few more disgruntled Rouletteers stare grimly back before “nexting” him. But the video proved so surprising and funny that bloggers quickly pounced on it, turning Merton into an Internet star.

It didn’t take long for an IRL star to match his efforts. Ben Folds—whom Merton looks and sounds suspiciously like—has been known in indie-rock circles since the ’90s. The singer-songwriter, who fronts the band Ben Folds Five, decided that Merton’s improv was too much fun to pass up. He started bringing a projection screen with him to his concerts, along with a laptop. On the screen, the audience could watch as Folds flipped through Chat Roulette, singing about the bored users who popped up, looking for a distraction from work but finding a well-known indie artist and a crowd of 2,000 people cheering behind him.

“Don’t be sad / Don’t be sad / Two thousand people are here in Charlotte / To cheer you up,” Folds crooned to a glum Rouleteer at the start of his own YouTube video.

Could this be the start of a whole trend? Will we see musicians competing to see who has the best improvisations on the Internet? Maybe, maybe not. But as long as it lasts, you might as well see a pro do it. Get <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”http://www.stubhub.com/ben-folds-tickets/”>Ben Folds tickets</a> from StubHub.