When I put the hits album I own on my iPod and listened to it a couple days ago, I knew this was going to be a fun one to talk about 😀 I was simply grinning from ear and ear, nearly the whole way through.
Up front, I need to say something:
There are few things in pop culture that have irked me MORE than the fact Rick Astley has been reduced to a meme, a running Internet joke.
“Never Gonna Give You Up” is quite famous for a number of reasons. But in the age of social media and YouTube, a sensation of “RickRolling” became a thing. Essentially what it means: you go to look up a video on YouTube, but instead of the video you clicked the link for, you end up watching a clip from this song’s music video. I ran into this for the first time when I got heavily into an abridged series for Yu-Gi-Oh! They make fun of the show, but a lot of it is good fun. However, the video kept getting taken down for copyright infringement 🙄 so instead, people kept up titling YouTube videos for episodes and you click, only to find this.
There’s also Family Guy when Peter was stuck in a Back to the Future situation. And Brian performed this song at the school dance. Not only did he say the song was by a gay guy, but they did the scene where a band member calls his famous cousin, but said “you know that generic sound you were looking for?”
OMG… I hate that so much!! Just kills me.
Ironically, I wound up getting a hits album by this guy because of another thing on TV that pissed me off. #28 on that list of Awesomely Bad Songs- where so many people were crapping all over this awesome song.
I’m like: I’ll show you guys, I’ll get an album to celebrate how awesome he is.
If memory serves me, it wound up being a birthday present. We were in FYE that day and my mom offered to buy me something so I picked up the Platinum & Gold Collection of hits. It was either that or Play’s album. It was in 2003 according to my Excel sheet. (You have as much music as I do, you kinda need a place to keep track, am I right?)
The end of storytime…
There’s a definite trend developing for this year. It doesn’t hurt that a lot of the MTV videos my dad recorded on a VHS tape were from 1987. Including a Spring Break performance by Starship. But yeah, a LOT of these songs and artists I’m highlighting this month came from the same place.
That Rick Astley video was the first time I saw the guy… and I think it’s the only music video of his I ever saw 😛 I don’t know if I just thought he was cute or what. I just really loved this song. To the degree where… just cuz he did this song, he is AWESOME. I have that sort of hero worship thing with a lot of people, particularly in the realm of voice acting.
I’ll go more into detail after seeing it again. But as far as 80’s videos go, it’s one of the most iconic to me. Just the way it was shot, the different clothes he wore. Also there was this black waiter who got to show off his moves. At one point, he runs up a wall and does a back flip. Anyone who can do that… again, awesome! I’m a sucker for stuff like that.
Anyway- this hits album has 12 songs. Only 9 were from the 80’s. Amazingly, he had a couple hits in the 90’s. The best is “Hopelessly”- which sounds like a Richard Marx or Chicago ballad. It’s gorgeous!
And I think I might have to address all of the 80’s ones in some capacity or another. Not all are the best songwriting, but that contagious catchiness in pop music is present in all of them. In some, that presence is more prevalent than in others.
What’s kinda funny about all this… I made a comment a little while ago about how I think of myself as lyric-driven in terms of the songs I enjoy. Yet with all these 80’s songs, it’s the music I keep talking about. In this instance, the lyrics were the selling point. All I can think to explain that: a lot of the songs I grew up with, they were lyric-forward catchy pop songs. I learned all the lyrics and would sing along to them all the time. Rick Astley was probably the earliest glimpse of that change in direction music would take in the 90’s.
The local classic rock radio station played him a bunch of times. Sometimes, it was his two most famous hits. But I’d also heard a couple others. At least 2 others. And the local DJ who stepped down earlier this year spoke of him fondly whenever he’d say that his song had just played. They used to have interns too and there was one that didn’t know much about older music. He’d never heard of Rick Astley and Gary audibly rolled his eyes and had to educate him.
Just reading up a little bit on his biography before the actual songs…
Apparently he retired from music at age 27. When he did his most famous song, he was only 21. Dang…
He was in a band where he was a drummer and when people left the band, he volunteered to be the new lead singer. During a gig, record producer Peter Waterman scouted him and worked with him within the company Stock Aitken Waterman to help him overcome his shyness. But despite the success, their relationship soured and they split. And apparently the British media was really rude to him when they reviewed his album, saying he was a puppet of their company despite the fact he wrote some of the songs himself.
Reading up on them… they were behind a lot of hit songs: “You Spin Me Right” and “Brand New Lover” by Dead or Alive, Banarama’s cover of “Venus” and “I heard a rumor” (OMG- no wonder that song is so catchy!!)…
To speak to Brian’s comment on Family Guy, he’d been happily married to the same woman since the 80’s.
It’s not confirmed on Wikipedia, but I think I read somewhere that Rick Astley was one of those acts where video really did kill the radio star. Cuz he got made fun of so much when people found out he wasn’t a soulful black guy, but instead a scrawny red-haired boy-next-door Brit. People had trouble taking him seriously as soon as they found out what he looked like. But I always will. His music set the precedent for my 90’s bubblegum pop.
I’ll save the best for last, but in no particular order:
“Giving up On Love”
When I was listing songs from memory I wanted to talk about, this was the one I didn’t remember 😛 it’s not one of the Stock Aitken Waterman tracks, but it has a lot of the nuances of those songs. Rick Astley co-wrote this one.
There’s a cool little Spanish guitar solo halfway through it. But the majority of it runs the same. It’s one of those crazy cases where it’s an upbeat song but the message is kinda sad.
Giving up on love cuz I’ve been before/Giving up on love and I don’t want you no more
“My Arms Keep Missing You”
This was a Stock Aitken Waterman production for sure. And apparently, it was part of a Double A side with “When I fall in love”… I didn’t even know Double A side was a thing. I just know there are A-Sides and B-Sides.
Anyway… this one is about a girl cheating on him and he misses having her around. Again, upbeat song, sad lyrics.
I keep telling myself it’s all right, even though I cry, there’s no question/how can I be happy when my arms keep missing, who’s been kissing you, since you went away.
..the lyrics just run on like a sentence and just go through my brain so easily. That’s kinda what a lot of these songs are like.
“It would take a strong man”
A little more melancholy than the previous songs. Not as upbeat with sad lyrics. It’s an interesting predicament, wanting to get out of a relationship, but not being able to quite do it. One of his better vocal performances- really soulful. Another Stock Aitken Waterman production. The way the lyrics are put together, they’re designed to be learned as a single entity.
When I think about leaving, think about losing, the only love I ever knew, every time I think of you… [this bridge goes right into the chorus so seamlessly, you nearly miss it]… my heart starts aching, my hands keep shaking and you know (x3) it would take a strong strong man to ever let you go
A lot of these songs have female backing vocalists as accompanists and this is one. Sometimes, I have moments in songs where I wish the notes went a different way. He sings the final 5 words in the same note. I’d rather sing it going down a couple steps. And the backing vocals do that.
“She Wants to Dance With Me”
I’d more or less been putting these songs in order of preference. But I put this one here because the other four need to be coupled together.
Super catchy pop song and has a good sax solo for good measure 😉 it was the first single for his 2nd album and the first one he wrote himself. So maybe it’s not the strongest chorus
She wants to dance with me/cuz I hold her so tight next to me/She wants to dance with me/cuz I let her be what she wants to be
Some of the synth stuff in this is just magical 😛 maybe my favorite bit… using the chorus as an example, he sings the first line. There’s a little tinkling of notes in response to it. Then a couple of beats later on the second line, it might even been slightly off the beat, but there’s a little effect like a disco note or something on a keyboard. I just like the sound of it. Not sure why.
The last four… they’re interesting cuz I think of them as doppelgangers. Until I get to the chorus, I sometimes can’t tell which song is which. It also doesn’t help that the same production team was behind two and another was behind the others.
“I’ll Never Set You Free”
For the most part, Rick Astley’s music paints him as a very approachable person. The boy next door. The kind of guy you can put your trust in to never break your heart. This one contradicts that a bit. If you interpret it a certain way, it’s no better than “Every Breath you take” by The Police.
This and the next song are both Rick Astley co-writes. And I have likened Prince’s “Strange Relationship” and Madonna’s “Stay” to one of them… I thought it was “Just Good Friends,” but it might have been this one. Something about them on that pop music scale bares an unmistakable similarity.
[I actually went ahead and tried this out… “I’ll never set you free” was that song I was thinking with those other two. I actually listened to them in a row and it’s a pretty cool experience. Just how similar those melodies were in some places]
One thing that sets this song apart from the others was the use of reverb on his voice. It’s a cool little effect. There’s ticking in the background. There’s a bah-dah-dah-dah like melody in the music followed by a few notes and an ethereal organ effect. The backing vocalists help a lot in the chorus where they say the titular lyric while he says “cuz I love you/and I need you/yes, I want you/cuz I love you”
“Just Good Friends”
I tend to gravitate a lot towards songs that aren’t the lead singles by artists and I like to give them the spotlight cuz they’re underappreciated. This definitely screamed B-Side to me, but it was oddly the B-Side for a song from his first album, instead of “I’ll set you free”
Musically, the melody is so aesthetically pleasing to me. When I heard it together, my mind was struggling to make connections cuz it genuinely reminded me of some other songs I enjoyed by other artists. But I don’t think it was “Strange Relationship” (I think I made the connection because one verse from one of those two songs had some of the same notes). There are some cool keyboard notes that remind me of some other songs I like, but I can’t recall which ones. I think one of them is a Mayte song “Ain’t No Place Like You” but also some of the stuff Prince did on Emancipation.
But the lyrics… omg, so catchy. I swear they stick in my head like glue.
You cannot tell me that it’s got to end this way/There’s nothing more to say/I just can’t believe that you’d walk on out that door when I need you more and more…
Cuz I’m falling in love with you/girl, yeah/after promising to be just good friends
Another, another little thing I’d change… he does “just good friends” on one lingering note with reverb. But it would sound better to me if there was echo, but there’s a layered vocal where the second voice that goes down a few steps. It would just sound all the better.
But I would really listen to this on repeat. I like this song so much 😛
“Together Forever”
I think the first time I heard this was on B101.1- our local adult contemporary station. And I used to get this and “Never Gonna Give You Up” mixed up all the time. You figure out within a couple of bars which song is the one playing. Like I said, doppelgangers. I had this sensation happen one other time– “Quit Breaking My Heart” and “As Long as You love me” by The Backstreet Boys. I’d mentioned Max Martin a bunch of times as a pop songwriting genius– he must have graduated from the school of Stock Aitken Waterman 😉
Sometimes between the two songs, I have trouble figuring out which one I like more. Both make me smile until my face hurts. Great poetry that just sticks in your head. With “Together Forever,” I’ll admit I’ll sometimes exaggerate when I sing the chorus cuz his British accent is pretty apparent in it.
A cool little musical thing- in the bridge before the final part of the song where there’s an instrumental break, I noticed there’s two musical parts playing at the same time. The main melody continues in the right headphone/earbud while there’s a different part in the left… but they come together at the end and the parts fit together nicely.
“Never Gonna Give You Up”
I don’t know what more I can say about this song… it’s an 80’s pop classic. Maybe the catchiest chorus in the history of pop music. I also kinda like how the instrumental part sounds like strings. They used to do this back in the 70’s where they did a lot of string arrangements in pop music.
Also- this video has over 700 million views, 6.3 million likes and… the 214,000 that disliked this video, I don’t wanna even know who they are. I’m not saying it’s the BEST song ever. I just think it deserves more credit than it gets as being a legit good pop song.
Yeah, amazing video. I mean, the lip-synching is cheesy as hell. But whatever. It goes between three different scenes where he’s singing to an empty hall with an old school mike, by a chainlink fence dressed in blue with sunglasses. But my favorite- that alleyway with the trenchcoat. That look in particular is a visual that stuck in my head all these years.
Makes me wanna listen to the song again 😛 it’s such a good one.
[I promise, this is the legit video with all the views and likes I mentioned… plus over a million comments. Mostly lame comments about the meme, but whatever. I added a couple of my own]
The Musings of DreamyPopRoyalty 