Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up Was '80s Perfection Until The Internet Ruined It

Long ago, Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" was a perfectly decent and fun '80s pop song, but then the internet got ahold of it and turned it into a joke, leading to such saturation that hearing it anymore is completely annoying. This is all because of the unnecessarily lengthy history of the Rickroll, in which Internet users promise a link to interesting content and instead redirect unsuspecting parties to the YouTube-hosted music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up." And thus the Rickroll. Per Australia's ABC News, the whole thing started on 4chan. A person would click on something enticing, and it would lead to a video of a duck on wheels. The gag was called duckrolling, but it didn't take off quite like Rickrolling. 

It was funny for a while, but now it's nearly 20 years later and people are still trying to Rickroll others. It's tired, it's hoary, and it's weird to keep picking on Astley, innocently caught up in the whole matter. Astley hasn't even made much from the Rickroll meme, as he isn't a credited songwriter and thus not entitled to the royalties generated by online video streaming. Not only does Rickrolling still show a complete lack of creativity and a bland sense of humor, but it's demolished the charms of a chestnut of a pop song. Look what they've done to "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Online trends usually move in and out in a matter of days, but Rickrolling has endured since 2007, bait-and-switching internet content with the video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," at No. 1 in 1988. The humor lies in trickery, but the song and singer became the butt of the joke. The clip is excruciatingly '80s — Astley, in ill-fitting, now passé clothing, awkwardly dancing through disjointed imagery of other people doing modern dances. The synth-reliant production on the song is very of its time, too. Basically, the video at the other end of a Rickroll confronts the viewer with the notion that the '80s are goofy. Sure, but isn't any era decades later?

A great pop song got buried under all that anti-nostalgic mockery. "Never Gonna Give You Up" has an undeniably catchy melodic hook, a rapid-fire chorus that's easy to sing along with, and Astley treats it seriously, promising undying love and devotion with a deep voice and earnest intent. The video collected 1.7 billion views, with many coming from Rickrolling, because few people are going to watch it of their own volition now. The world got sick of "Never Gonna Give You Up" because of a decreasingly funny annoyance, when it's really a tune that can stand on its own merits. After all, there are plenty of far worse and far more dated '80s rock songs so corny that our ears are still burning from embarrassment.