In the latest mission of his quest to milk the nostalgia of any group that has disposable income, Barry Manilow is releasing an all-covers album of songs from the 1980s next month. Manilow will take on “Careless Whisper,” “Against All Odds (Take A Look At Me Now),” “Islands In The Stream” (with Reba McEntire), and… “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Yes, that’s right: We’ve evolved as a society in such a way that even Barry Freakin’ Manilow has to pander to those people on the Internet who still think the phenomenon of “Rickrolling”–in which you make yourself laugh by surprising whoever you’re engaged in instant-messenger chatter with a link to a clip of Rick Astley singing his 1987 hit–is funny. You’d think that the man who sang on many a McDonald’s ad would deserve a break today, but I guess this is the time we live in. Anyway, it’s time to figure out how Manilow will fare against other people who have tried to hop on the Rickrolling bandwagon! I’ve placed five other covers of Astley’s signature track after the jump.
Earlier this week, MTV Europe announced the nominations for the European Music Awards, and I got halfway through a post about the nods before I got completely, utterly bored. Duffy’s Rockferry as a potential Album Of The Year? A shoehorned-in nod for the huge-in-Europe 30 Seconds To Mars? Well, apparently I wasn’t the only person on the Internet to be a bit underwhelmed by the nods, because in an effort to rally the troops via the employment of a meme that died six months ago, MTV has decided that Rick Astley–he of the Internet gotcha known as the “Rickroll”–should be one of the potential winners of the “Best Act Ever” award. And to further ensure that Internet attention would be forthwith, one of the other nominees is the way-more-popular-online-than-in-real-life German act Tokio Hotel. Yes, that’s for the best act ever, and not of that three-month period during sophomore year when you wrote in your journal a lot and thought hard about life’s unfairness. The full slate of potential all-time winners after the jump.
Ashley Tisdale’s cover of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” has finally hit the web in its entirety. Naturally, some YouTube yuksters are rickrolling Tisdale fans, claiming to have the new track while offering the old, but we’re looking out for our Degree Girls out there. More »
Ashley Tisdale’s cover of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” has finally hit the web in its entirety. Naturally, some YouTube yuksters are rickrolling Tisdale fans, claiming to have the new track while offering the old, but we’re looking out for our Degree Girls out there. More »
High School Musical star Ashley Tisdale is releasing an EP of ’80s cover songs titled Degree Girl: OMG! Jams which is probably my favorite album title since Romeo! TV Show (The Season), if not The Big Problem ≠ The Solution, The Solution = Let It Be. “Time After Time,” “Too Many Walls,” “Heaven Is A Place On Earth,” “Shadows Of The Night,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and the legendary “Never Gonna Give You Up” are all essayed on this effervescent turd, which lacks the thoughtful shadings and deconstructive allure of a DJ Sammy track.
I spent this afternoon at the Mets-Phillies tilt that opened Shea Stadium’s final season (FYI to any Phillies fans in the audience: just don’t), and the one thing I was looking forward to–aside from my thwarted hopes of a Metropolitans victory–was the eighth-inning spin of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Last week, the Internet had decided that Rick Astley’s late-’80s hit was the choice for Shea’s eighth-inning singalong, after learning that the Mets had opened the choice for said song to an online poll, and apparently that movement had been successful: According to statistics flashed during the eighth inning and confirmed to me by an MLB operative, more than five million people wrote in Astley’s song as their singalong pick. Which would, in normal times, have made the song the winner. But the Mets, being as Internet-savvy as a Major League Baseball team could be these days, had a trick up their “Final Season At Shea”-patched sleeves!
Good news, Mets fans: Those of you who are, like me, personally offended at the way the Shea Stadium PA takes “inspiration” from Fenway Park and plays “Sweet Caroline” for the whole stadium to sing along with in the middle of the eighth inning may have a reprieve. Like the Nationals before them, the Mets have launched a balloting campaign where Mets fans can vote on their pick for the eighth-inning singalong, with the candidates including “Movin’ Out,” “Livin’ On A Prayer,” the theme from freaking Friends, and (sigh) “Sweet Caroline.” Given my intimate knowledge of the Mets’ demographics, I was pretty sure that “Movin’ Out” would be the winner of this particular contest–that is, until I received an e-mail with the subject line “RickRolling Shea Stadium.”
The Manchester Evening News has a charming profile of the long-in-hiding blue-eyed soul singer Rick Astley, who opted out from stardom in 1993 but is touring this summer on the Here and Now Tour. (That’s the tour where artists’ set lengths are determined by the number of big hits they had.) More »
Times dining critic Frank Bruni gets Rickrolled in his own comments section. (I kind of saw it coming after he wrote incredulously that he was reminded of the adorable Enlish singer while dining at a Thomas Keller restaurant, but it was still funny, and would have only been better if the culprit… More »
In 1992, Nintendo released a program for its Super Nintendo system entitled Mario Paint, a cartridge bundled with a PC-style mouse that was probably ground zero for my interest in, um, digital art. But in addition to letting those without home computers sketch 16-bit masterpieces, Mario Paint also included a simple MIDI program that allowed players bleep and blorp your way through tunelets like this Mario-ified version of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And because the Internet refuses to let anything recede into pop cultural history, there are not only multiple programs that recreate the Mario Paint sequencer for the ProTools age, there’s a thriving YouTube underground dedicated to reviving the sounds of musical mushrooms and fire flowers. Now, after spending a few hours trawling through multiple shakily captured takes on “In Da Club” and “Chocolate Rain,” we present five of our favorite Mario Paint musical moments, pop recreated through meowing kitties and bouncing Mario heads.
