A few weeks ago I was in the kitchen of my parents’ house relishing in the last few days of my teacher’s college practicum. The thing about my parents’ kitchen is they have this clock radio that’s always playing the same radio station, all the time. And the station is one of these baby boomer, AM stations that plays oldies and easy-listening. Great, okay. So the next song that comes on is Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which is amazing entirely because, through the lens of the station’s demographic of listeners, the song is being played completely unironically. For an entire generation of suburbanites this is straight, serious Astley. There’s no joke behind it — nothing to laugh at.
I’m betting that the DJ knows the meme, and he’s sending out a “rickroll” to all the boomers in the know and to all the people, like me, who are caught in that moment within an earshot of a radio playing this particular station.
But it’s a bigger joke here because it illustrates the vulnerability of people who can’t use computers and stand outside internet culture; maybe it’s not a vulnerability exactly (it’s not hurting them) but it’s a weird division in society that is shrinking and shrinking with each day as more and more grandparents die. (We’ll be thinking about “the last person to remember life without the internet” in the same way we do now about World War II veterans.) It’s a little bit terrifying to think how easily a whole artist’s career can be stomped on because some kids on a forum somewhere took a song and made it a meme — an April Fool’s joke for every day of the year.
But it’s also a little bit heartwarming to know that for at least another couple of decades there’s going to be a bunch of people sitting in rocking chairs and at dentists’ waiting rooms listening to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” without all the recent baggage which has been thrust upon it. For many it’s still a pop song.
5 comments ↓
heh, i just pray our generation is able to keep up because we landed on the right side of the internet wave. i suppose falling behind is inevitable though. i’m already completely far gone when it comes to pop culture. friggin kids and their sideways hats.
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a an interview with Rick Astley where he seems pretty amused by the whole affair.
I had completely 100% forgotten about this(which doesn’t happen too often to me), and so this led to a REdiscovery of the vid. It was odd because I immediately started to feel nostalgia for something that I had originally discovered only a few month(/weeks??) before.
It’s all very strange if you ask me.
You probably shouldn’t assume that our entire generation is internet savvy. Because that’s very far from the truth. I’d say the vast, vast majority of people our age have no idea what you’re referring to with this post.
Yea, I see your point. But kids these days do on a higher frequency, because their social lives are completely intertwined with “networking” via technology. i.e. the idea that kids now aren’t playing outside not because they hate the outside, but because “playing outside” used to be their social space to interact with their friends — now that space exists in their bedrooms on a computer. “It rained this weekend” is the same now as “My internet was down.”
If a large portion of their time for socialization exists on the computer, you can bet these sorts of memes get passed around a lot more quickly (and probably inevitably — especially when you consider things like the linkology of blogs).
But yea, especially as the internet grows, it’s probably going to be possible to avoid these mass-memes and for everything to be divided in spaces of interaction/social groups.
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