Instead, Waterman hired Astley as a tape operator and gofer in the SAW studios. The very young Astley was painfully shy, so Pete Waterman figured that he wasn’t ready for pop-idol status yet. While Stock-Aitken-Waterman were locking down their whole pop-dominance strategy, Rick Astley was hanging out in the background, brewing tea. That Stock-Aitken-Waterman shit was everywhere. My family moved to London for a year in 1988, and I had my pop-music awakening in the midst of all this. All in all, Stock-Aitken-Waterman banged out 13 UK chart-toppers in the second half of the ’80s, most of which sounded almost exactly like one another. One of those chart-toppers was a duet with Jason Donovan, Minogue’s co-star on the Australian show Neighbours, and that guy had a couple of his own SAW-produced #1 hits around the same time. (It’s a 6.) In the UK, though, Minogue was an absolute supernova of a star in the late ’80s, and she had four SAW-produced #1 hits between 19. In the US, Minogue’s highest-charting single is her 1988 version of Little Eva’s “ The Loco-Motion,” which Stock-Aitken-Waterman produced and which peaked at #3. (They produced Bananarama’s chart-topping 1986 version of “ Venus.”) Quickly, though, Stock-Aitken-Waterman found their lane by cranking out cheap, samey dance-pop hits for fresh-faced singers like the very young Australian soap opera star Kylie Minogue. Stock-Aitken-Waterman got their start crafting hi-NRG bangers for groups like Dead Or Alive and Bananarama. By the late ’80s, these three guys had basically colonized the UK charts. Pete Waterman was one third of the production team known as Stock-Aitken-Waterman. One night, the producer Pete Waterman heard Astley singing, and he decided that he wanted to record this kid. Astley started off as the drummer for a Northern soul band called FBI, but he pulled a Phil Collins and became the singer once the group’s frontman left. (When Astley was born, the #1 song in America was Petula Clark’s “ My Love,” which isn’t great but which has never become a soul-sucking meme.) As a kid, Astley played in some local bands with his friend David Morris, who is currently a virulently right-wing member of Parliament. Rick Astley, the pasty and deep-voiced young man who popped up on all those office-desktop screens at the end of the second Bush era, came from a rural English village called Newton-Le-Willows. After all, a couple of decades earlier, it had been a #1 hit. Also, “Never Gonna Give You Up” already existed within the collective cultural memory. It could get stuck in someone’s head, and it could ruin that person’s day. “Never Gonna Give You Up” is a bad song, and it’s a catchy bad song. These people could’ve presumably used any song in the vast history of recorded music, but they went with “Never Gonna Give You Up,” and there’s a reason for that. ![]() When you rickrolled somebody, you simply forced them to allow “Never Gonna Give You Up” into their headspace. The central joke of the rickroll was that there was no joke. I didn’t even know 4chan existed back then, so I don’t know whether it was a hive of baby Nazis yet, but let’s just say it was. This stunt apparently started off on 4chan. 2007 was the year of the rickroll - the internet-borne phenomenon where someone would send you a link to something that looked interesting, and you’d open it, and then you’d get little pop-ups of Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” all over your computer. I don’t know exactly where this whole something is funny if it sucks idea took hold, but 2007 seems like a pretty good starting point. It’s entirely possible that I was a shitty little shit at that age, too, but instead I’m choosing to blame the Minecraft YouTubers who have colonized this kid’s imagination. I have an eight-year-old who thinks that just fucking screaming in my ear without warning is a genius-level prank. We’ve all somehow apparently agreed that subjecting other people to obnoxious bullshit is the funniest thing that anyone can ever do. ![]() In the past decade and a half, a particular style of non-comedy comedy has risen up out of the global network of bored people on computers. Nobody has any idea what’s funny anymore. The internet has permanently damaged our collective sense of humor. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.
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