Soundtracked

Never Gonna Give You Up

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This week's theme: One Hit Wonders}

It's inescapable. Virtually unavoidable. No, I'm not describing "The Soundtrack of Your Life" , but it's close enough...what I'm really here for today is The Rick Astley Phenomenon. There is no denying it; you often have no choice but to just watch it happen. One of the hidden joys of any Soundtrackers challenge is the inevitable Rickroll; it happens like an undercard fight at a premier boxing match that draws some attention away from the main event.

And you know this song. You probably know it all too well (and not because of some mobile phone commercial  ).

Ahhh, to be young again. To discover that teenage girls who idolize boyish-looking men like boys who can write poetry in their little love letter correspondences. I don't know if kids today can fully appreciate what we had to go through, passing notes in the hallways in perfectly-folded squares or triangles so as to avoid nosy friends or teachers. And to appeal to the girl, you had to think like a girl (sorta like the whole "to catch a criminal, think like a criminal" thing ). If that meant turning a sheet of notebook paper into a quarter of the size of your palm for stealth delivery and drawing some hearts on it, that's what you did. That was social networking in the early 90's. I don't know if I would've survived high school with AOL Instant Messenger or Facebook.

It's weird to see that one of my doctors' offices still uses AIM to communicate back and forth about things. Is this common? Is there some hidden flaw in Microsoft Office that makes you not check important emails? I just...I don't get it.

But back to the song...it encapsulates a lot of the cheesiness of that era what lovelorn boys surely meant with good intentions when trying to impress young ladies. "Be the person she has pictures of up on her wall." How can that go wrong? It does. 1) You're not Rick Astley. 2) You will, in fact, let her down...and also give her up. And make her cry. Maybe even tell lies. And certainly, you'll desert her; especially when things get weird because high school and everything after. 3) You're still not Rick Astley, and absolutely the hardest demographic on the planet to please has always been teenage girls, because what they love most one day is what they loathe the next. Learning, as a guy, that you'll never win, isn't something they teach in marriage school...there is only one way you find this out: the hard way. For every successful man who is a dick to women, there is an ex-girlfriend (or several) behind him that he tried his damnedest to please and still failed. And the ultimate kick in the junk comes from realizing that switching up your game never works, because everyone has different expectations and soft spots.

And all it does is bring you back to the beginning, where you fell in love with the idea of being in love. Not a person, not a place, but a thing. A goddamn idea. "What is this magical 'love' that you speak of, and how can I get me some of that for myself?" This is how pop music has been warping our senses for years and years and years.

"I...just wanna tell you how I'm feeling."
Lyrics.  

And this totally wasn't the entry I planned on writing last night . I was gonna go in an entirely different direction until I came across an article about the Karmic Retribution of Rickrolling  . The truth is palpable and universal: The world does you a good deed, and then it shits on you for acknowledging it...so then you must haunt everyone and everything in your way to make up for the best thing in your life not getting the true praise it deserves. I get it. I can get behind it.