A video screen grab shows Pikotaro singing his YouTube hit song Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen song. (Hana Kusumoto/Stars and Stripes)
TOKYO — On the day that Pikotaro’s “PPAP” was recognized as the shortest song to reach the Billboard Hot 100, Pikotaro performed his “long version” for journalists.
Yes, that’s right: at 2 minutes, it was nearly three times the length of the original that’s been viewed more than 65 million times on Youtube, with 40,000 lip-synched versions also uploaded to the Internet.
Pikotaro is the stage name for a 53-year-old Japanese comedian who was little known just two months ago. He had journalists laughing as he performed Friday at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Tokyo.
Among the fans of “Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen” – PPAP – is Justin Bieber, who has tweeted that he loved the original video.
Pikotaro shot to fame when the simple music video went viral in September, becoming the top-viewed item on Youtube for the week of Sept. 30-Oct. 6. It shows him jabbing a pen into an apple and a pineapple and uses just a handful of repeated words.
“The Internet is amazing,” he said.
