Archive for April 2008
"You wouldn’t get this from any other guy…"
Especially about the Internet. I blog elsewhere, write professionally under another name. I have learned from those experiences that this here InterWebzoTubal place is filled with a good deal of nastiness.
Like pranks. People create viruses. They make fake personal profiles on MySpace, or Facebook. Nasty stuff, meant only to hurt or slander another person.
There are stories like the terrible tale of Megan Meier.
Megan was the 13-year-old girl from Dardenne Prairie, MO who committed suicide after a failed Web romance in 2006. Turned out the ‘romance’ was not with hunky 16-year-old ‘Josh Evans,’ but with some people masquerading as Evans to try and get dirt from Megan on her friendship with another girl. One of those people was the other girl’s mom.
If you don’t know about Megan, read the Wiki article I linked or get the fuck off the Web. Megan Meier is one of those stories you just know, if you surf enough.
But I do love one particular Web-borne prank. It’s so well-known at this point I feel stupid even explaining it all. Just in case you’re the one lone soul who has never used YouTube or watched a tech segment on a cable news broadcast, here’s a link explaining this meme that just makes me smile.
You see, I love being RickRolled.
Most 80s music was crap. Even 80s pop icon Rick Astley — the “Rick” in RickRolling — said the song behind the RickRoll phenomenon, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” was “pretty naff [cheesy], really.”
The first time I fell for a RickRoll, I giggled and laughed like a 3rd grader for 5 minutes straight. My 80s nostalgia was tweaked. I graduated from high school in the middle of that decade, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” is one of the few songs I can recall hearing on the radio in my early years in college. It also hit me right away — RickRolling is such a good-natured prank.
I mean, I rarely read a response to a RickRoll that seems pissed. In threads on social bookmarking sites like Digg, in comments on message boards and blogs, the majority of RickRoll victims react the same way — they think it’s hilarious. If it isn’t hilarious, the reactions at least seem amused. Even when a person is new to the phenomenon, their confusion as to why they just clicked a link to a tacky 80s music video when they thought they might see Britney’s new accidental upskirt vid is tinged with amusement.
That’s how you do a RickRoll, see…
You gotta see this!!!! Britney done done it agin, y’all!!!1!!1! OMFGZ!!!1!1!!
A click on the preceding link should have taken you to smilin’ Rick Astley, circa 1987 or so, rockin a fly ginger pompadour and some truly natty naff threads, Wayfarers and a trenchcoat. If you’re pretty savvy about html, you may also note that I used SnipURL.com to disguise the link. A successful RickRoll can often be done by using that site or TinyURL.com to hide the fact you’re sending your victim to YouTube.
The RickRoll is old, in Internet terms. That’s one of the amusing things about seeing mainstream news articles about the phenomenon — the news writers explain it as if it’s the ‘new thing,’ and it’s been going on for nearly a year.
But the fact that it’s hung on and even become a phenomenon beyond the Web is striking. You have to wonder why.
Have you ever been in a stressful situation, and instead of bursting into tears found yourself doubled over laughing? Not hysterical laughter, but good, clean, cleansing laughter that drained all the tension away? I have, more than once. Each time it happened, something triggered the laughing fit, usually something genuinely funny in any context.
The wild laughter was a symptom of my mind saying enough, though. Saying I couldn’t handle any more stress, any more darkness right then.
I think the psychology behind the longevity of the RickRoll as a prank and a meme has something to do with that basic human need to just bust a gut and not take anything or anyone too seriously for a minute. To just not give a fuck. To just sit for 3 minutes and 30-odd seconds and watch a silly video playing a completely frothy and inconsequential pop song.
We all have a need for things to just not matter, sometimes. The surprise of the video starting, the bouncy music, the dark-toned soul singer’s voice coming from a guy who looks like he’s barely out of his schoolboy’s knickers — it’s bewildering, then for a moment annoying, and finally, just funny and stupid. You laugh, and you stop taking yourself or the world too seriously.
The person who does the RickRoll gets that sly satisfaction known to pranksters everywhere, if he or she learns the fruits of their labors. Yet that satisfaction comes without any real, lasting guilt — if guilt enters the picture at all (I personally have never once felt bad about RickRolling another person, but I’ve also made sure I wasn’t promising to link them to something serious at the time). After all — what harm have you done?
As the RickRoll has hung on in pop culture over the last year and made its way off the Web, another weirdly joyful aspect of the joke has been revealed. It seems so trivial, but it’s as if it brings people together.
Anonymous collects across the street from a Scientology “Church” and unleashes a boombox RickRoll. The Anons are protesting what they see as a very real threat to free speech from the wealthy and litigious “church,” but at the same time, there’s a strange, youthful joy in what they’re doing as they dance and sing along with the song. And there is no real harm in it. Watching Anons goof along with the song you are seeing a truly puckish effort, entertaining street theater that still makes a point. Whimsy and humor are bound up with a serious statement about the beauty of the human rights to free speech and free assembly.
I learned about a new wrinkle in the RickRoll today. Someone decided to take the not-new concept of the flash mob and pair it with the RickRoll. As a result, some 500 strangers got together in a crowded London train station, and they Rickmobbed the place.
It was loud. The videos were often shaky, and sometimes the video camera’s owner out-of-tune voice was louder than others, shouting the words to the song. It was bizarre.
It was beautiful.
Of course, there are better things people could do with their time and energy. But why? Why right then? Why not take 2 minutes or so out of your busy day and sing a stupid 80s pop chestnut along with 499 other strangers? There was no harm in it. If you got a look at many of the faces seen on the videos of the event uploaded to YouTube, there was actually — that word again — something like joy. For a moment, they all seemed to say, we don’t give a fuck. We’re just singing “Never Gonna Give You Up” and being silly.
Hell yes, it’s all improbable. The whole phenomenon is absurd. The first guy who thought up the RickRoll probably just did it because it was goofy, and because the song was so overtly “naff.”
But I think we too often forget just how badly we need those moments in our lives. I know I do. When I was a kid, I’d sometimes wake from nightmares as kids will do, but not call for my mom. She worked hard during the day, and maybe I wanted to be a big boy, put myself back to sleep.
I couldn’t though. Did I cuddle up to a stuffed toy? No. I didn’t turn on the TV, either. I’m old enough to have lived in a time and place when most TV stations were off the air by 3 in the morning.
In those situations, I always found something funny to read. A cartoon book, a stupid comic book, a joke book. If I could eventually manage a grin from looking at any of those, I could calm down enough to get back to sleep. Laughter, or at least a light-hearted smile, would lift the dark veil left by the bad dreams enough for me to get back to sleep again.
I’m sometimes sour and cynical, but I’m also a bit of a romantic. Not just in the typical sense of the word, either. I’m a romantic about the human condition. I have to be, or I wouldn’t think anything about a silly Rickmob in a London train station was “beautiful.”
But it was. Beautiful in a way that we can only experience now, at this point in history. For that, I almost envied those Brits, with their printouts, their Guy Fawkes/V masks, their Rick Astley trenchcoats.
My father used to rail against movie musicals because they were so ridiculous. People in the real world never just drop everything and start singing, he said.
I thought of him today as I watched videos of the Rickmob. How much I love his own deeply jaded and pessimistic brain. I felt bad. Hey Dad, I thought — things can change in the most unexpected ways, sometimes.
Sometimes, now, people really will just drop everything and sing. And because it’s a song that doesn’t matter… well, it matters. You can’t sing “Never Gonna Give You Up” in the middle of a Rickmob and be remotely serious. And ain’t that the point?
It’s crassly commercial, but what the hell. Some people calling themselves “The RickRollerz” got together and made a new mix of the Rick Astley song. Then they very cleverly set it to videos from the London Rickmob. The video is embedded below. You can see The RickRollerz MySpace here.
