Rick Astley celebrates 35 years of Never Gonna Give You Up with an online invitation to imitate him

Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the hit’s original release Never Gonna Give You Upfrom Rick Asleywho celebrated the anniversary with a special invitation to his fans.

The proposal is to participate in a Spotify Canvas Contestwhere they can send a video dancing like Astley, which will then be uploaded as a “visualizer canvas” while the song is played on the Spotify platform.

For a week, a different canvas will appear each day.

historical success

Never Gonna Give You Up It was the biggest hit of Rick Astley’s debut album: it became number one in 25 countries, including the United States, where it was certified Quintuple Platinum.

In England, the song spent five weeks straight at the top of the charts and was the best-selling song in 1987.

In May of this year, Rick Astley released a remastered version of another hit of that album, Whenever you need someone and a few weeks ago he concluded a big 56 stadium tour of the United States with other bands from those 80s, such as New Kids on the Block, Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue.

The famous viral joke

In 2007, a viral joke started getting popular which was called “Rickroll” or “Rickrolling”. It is an internet joke that Rick Astley refers to and consists of an explosive link disguised as something interesting that the user can click on, but redirects you to the music video from Never Gonna Give You Up. When a person enters the link that leads them to this music video, they are said to have been “picked up” or “picked up”.

This action has not only affected many web pages, but has spread beyond the world of the Internet; like, for example, when the song made a surprise appearance in the parade that US department stores organize every year at Macy’s on Thanksgiving, a televised event with millions of viewers.

The first time it was “tweaked” was in May 2007 on the video game tabloid 4chan, where a link was supposed to lead to a video game trailer. car theft iv, really led to Astley’s video clip. This was an inside joke of 4chan for a short time.

That month, the practice achieved internet notoriety, becoming popular after its use on April Fool’s Day 2008 by various companies and websites, including YouTube, who “rolled” all of their featured videos that day. In April of the same year, a SurveyUSA investigation estimated that at least 18 million Americans had been “locked up”.

Astley told CNN in 2017 that he didn’t understand anything when a friend emailed him and a video of his song appeared. He didn’t realize it was a viral joke, so he called him and figured out what it was all about.

A career that continues

Thanks to the impact of his early successes, Rick Astley’s career is still active and regularly travels the world.

His career began in 1985 when he sang in a soul group called the FBI and was noticed by famous music producer Pete Waterman who convinced him to move to London to work in his PWL studios. Under the leadership of the trio of producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman, he recorded his first album and quickly became famous.

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