Hold On To What We've Got

"Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi 1986

I’ve been sending this newsletter out for half a year now, and it was inevitable that This Song would make an appearance. I’m so grateful to Brynn Callahan for doing what I have never been strong enough to do.

Carl

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by Brynn Callahan

In March of 2022, my thirteen-year-old cousin Liam got into the passenger seat of my new car and I handed him my iPhone. This is a bad move if you know any thirteen-year-olds, and if you don’t have password protection on your iPhone which I don’t, and if you know this thirteen-year-old in particular, because he regularly uses the Amazon Echo in the kitchen to subject us all to the musical renditions of “The Chicken Wing Beat,” a song that now fills me with homicidal rage.

“No ‘Chicken Wing Beat,’” I told him, because I am stupid but not masochistic, “and the rule is, you sing along in my car. You don’t have to be good, but you have to be loud.”

Liam’s favorite artist is Toby Mac, which is not surprising when you remember that we live in Texas, his father is a firefighter, and his mother listens exclusively to the Christian radio station. I grew accustomed last summer to the sound of the Amazon Echo singing “Streetlights! Streetlights” at six-thirty in the morning, which gave me flashbacks to my brother sleeping through his alarm to Phillip Phillips’s “Gone, Gone, Gone,” another song that fills me with homicidal rage. Thus far I have avoided this classical conditioning towards Toby Mac by virtue of being an adult able to take naps when the child has gone off to school. Liam is also much better at waking to his alarm than my brother ever was.

With the same devastating stage fright that ended my career in high school musicals, Liam was at first shy about choosing the music for our car ride. I goaded him through psychological warfare: the Glee cast cover of “Livin’ on a Prayer” mashed with the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up.” His response could not have pleased me more: “If you’re gonna listen to the song, listen to it right,” at which point he put on Bon Jovi.

There are few songs that encourage singing along in the car the way that Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” does. I believe it appears on the Spotify playlist “Songs that Never Fail to Get White People Turnt.” My mother, who saw Bon Jovi in concert in high school, introduced me to the song decades ago. I was very pleased to be wailing to it with my youngest cousin. When I was his age, an opera coach taught me how to throw my voice up into a note in my headvoice; I employed this technique liberally on the “Whoa”s and “Livin’”s. Perhaps emboldened by my unrestrained shrieking, perhaps trying to drown me out, Liam began singing along as well.

When the song came to an end, he said, “Okay, okay, I’ve got one.”

That opening riff—those electronic drums starting in the left speaker, puh-chh! puh-chh-dd-dduh puh-chh-dd-duh (forgive me, I’m a percussionist)—before being overtaken by the singing synth is one of the most recognizable sounds on the internet.

I responded with, of course, a “Whoo!” delighted to know that in 2022, kids are still learning about the Rickroll.

The first time that I heard “Never Gonna Give You Up” was on Family Guy. In 2006 I was eleven and about as rigid and humorless a tween as it was possible to be, and I decided that Family Guy’s humor was crass and inappropriate and therefore deserved only my disdain.

Of course, in 2006, my dad had been deployed to Iraq for about a year, and in his quarters on base, he was watching Family Guy. That’s not all that he was doing, but for half an hour of his downtime each day (when he got downtime, and when they had electricity), everyone at the FOB knew that Major Callahan was not to be disturbed. This unofficial regulation read in its entirety: “Don’t poke the bear.” So in my household, we made allowances for my father’s nostalgia regarding his coping mechanisms. When he returned, Dad continued to watch Family Guy, and I maintained my uppity disdain for adult cartoons and tried not to be in the room when he was watching.

I guess I must have heard “Never Gonna Give You Up” in 2009—I measure out most of my childhood not in years but in the houses we lived in during my father’s various deployments, and we were in the house on Applewood Lane. I was on the computer in the next room when I heard what, to me, sounded like disco, and then a surprisingly smooth voice. I have never been able to put words to what makes a song speak to me—I hear it for the first time and it hits me like a medieval mace to the brainstem. Now that I’m an adult, I respond by using Spotify’s repeat 1 feature to wring every possible neurotransmitter out of the track, until the song loses its luster and starts making me grind my teeth, and then I turn it off before it moves me to homicidal rage. I’m told this is not a unique experience. In 2009—come to think of it, I was thirteen—I emerged from the office to go memorize as much of the lyrics of the song as I could, so that I could Google them later, and perhaps purchase the track for $1.99 on iTunes with one of my coveted gift cards.

Imagine the outrage I felt when I discovered that the song was being “performed” by a cartoon dog. Not just any dog. The Family Guy dog. The sheer audacity of Family Guy to play good music, and make me like that music—it was not to be borne.

The episode in question is the parody of Back to the Future’s performance of “Johnny B. Goode.” At the time, I hadn’t ever seen Back to the Future. I didn’t even understand what they were referencing. I was just angry, and I went back to the office, and my dad never did get a satisfactory answer as to why I was slamming doors in his house.

My next encounter with “Never Gonna Give You Up” was probably around that timeframe. I had a friend who introduced me to The Vlogbrothers—the YouTube team of young adult author John Green and his brother Hank, who went on to found VidCon and Project for Awesome and Crash Course and all manner of things that made internet history. We don’t have to unpack all of my high school fascinations, just the musical ones, so the salient point is this: I have always been a completionist. And, in the backlog of Vlogbrothers’ first year of content—the project they called Brotherhood 2.0—there is a video of Hank Green dancing to “Never Gonna Give You Up” while wearing a knee-length pink tutu, singing with what I believe was complete sincerity: “You wouldn’t get this from any other guy!”

(Interestingly, I did. Years later, I attended a tour of a college that included actual students’ dorm rooms, and I noticed a collection of John Green books on someone’s windowsill, and I struck up a conversation with them about the fandom around the Vlogbrothers—the unironically named Nerdfighteria—and convinced my grandmother in one fell swoop that this was, despite the urban environment and its eight-hour distance from my home, the right school for me. Months later, during move-in, a team of six tall skinny white college boys in tutus arrived to carry laundry carts full of my possessions up to my freshman dorm room. “Of course you’re going to school here,” family friend Mike observed, watching a man wearing fairy wings wheel my bedding down the sidewalk.)

I learned two important things from Hank Green’s performance of “Never Gonna Give You Up.” First: the song did not originate with Family Guy, which was a profound relief to me, because it meant that I was permitted to like it again. Secondly—because the performance was not a whim of the internet, but a “punishment” imposed by the arcane and unknowable (read: I forgot them, it’s 2022) rules of the Brotherhood 2.0 project—there was something inherently funny about the song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

According to Wikipedia, Rickrolling as a meme originated on 4chan in 2007. I was not, thank god, on 4chan in 2007. It originated from some other similar bait-and-switch practice I don’t care about; the idea is that a disguised hyperlink reports to lead to certain content, but once the user clicks on it, they are taken to the YouTube video for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” The meme achieved, uh, maximum memesis when YouTube itself Rickrolled every one of its videos on April Fools’ Day 2008; later that year, Rick Astley interrupted the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to perform a lipsynced version of the song that would bring him back from a ten-year hiatus.

In 2018, the television show Westworld released a video that claimed to be extensive spoilers for their upcoming second season, which when clicked took the viewer to lead actress Evan Rachel Wood performing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” accompanied on piano by costar Angela Sarafyan. The same year, the Disney-Pixar film Ralph Breaks the Internet promised a post-credits scene showing spoilers for Frozen II, only to cut to animated protagonist Ralph performing the Rickroll.

Before the onset of the Rickroll, in 1989 “Never Gonna Give You Up” was allegedly weaponized as part of Operation Nifty Package to psychologically torment dictator Manuel Noriega outside his sanctuary in the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See and force him to surrender to the United States invasion of Panama. It was—according to the after-action report—played alongside ear-ringing chicken noises, “Electric Spanking of War Babies” by Funkadelic, and “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” by Bruce Cochran. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft pointed to this as a “low point in US Army history.”

The thing about the Rickroll is: it’s not a mean prank. It’s not offensive content. There’s no gross-out gag or crass humor inherent in the Rickroll. You expect one thing and you get another.

And it’s just a nice song.

Without the context around it, “Never Gonna Give You Up” is a love song with a thumping beat, 3D audio, synthetic strings, and a backup chorus out of 1950s doo-wop. It’s a testament to devotion. When I was 17, I read a fanfiction in which Captain America, blissfully unaware of the practice of Rickrolling, whispers to Iron Man the lyrics—and completely fails to understand why Tony Stark falls apart laughing in what he meant to be a tender moment. Last year, Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddingham, a performer on the West End, sings the song during a funeral—and it’s perfectly thematically appropriate and moving, leading to a call-and-response encompassing most of the cast.

Even the composer Mike Stock has no idea why the song is so successful, or why it was chosen for this particular role in the digital age. Any effort to point to the song itself, or the singer, or the recording label—it falls prey to the sharpshooter fallacy. This is where the marksman shoots three bullets into the wall, then draws the bull’s-eye around the holes. The success of “Never Gonna Give You Up” cannot be identified—what makes it funnier than Colonel Abrams’ “Trapped”? Why wasn’t any other Rick Astley song chosen? Nor can it be recreated, because fifteen years after the onset of the Rickroll’s popularity, the Rickroll itself is the joke, building on years of use and internet exchange. No jumpscare, no screech of “JOHN CENA,” not even the original duckroll, can replace the Rickroll’s status, because at this point its history reinforces its standing.

And it’s still a song you can crank up in your car, thirteen-year-old as your co-pilot, and bellow along to. You know the rules, and so do I.

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Brynn Callahan is a writer of weird fiction and equally weird nonfiction. An aged Army Brat, she has 8 hometowns and an equally checkered job history, from tarot card reader to postal support employee. She has spent the last two years running with other people’s dogs. Read more of her work here.