internet cultural studies #2

today's internet cultural lesson is about that bane/boon of all forum goers called "the rick roll."

in the halcyon days of the internet, discussion forums were created and divided by topic to allow serious minded people from all over the world to discuss issues relating to said topics.

unserious minded people could not let all this seriousness persist without challenge and attempts were made to "derail" the conversations.

some of the first attempts at derailing conversations were less than subtle and would consist of people interjecting in the middle of a conversation posts like "and now, here are some pictures of some ducks/bunnies/kitties" followed by pictures of ducks/bunnies/kitties. sometimes the discussion would turn away from serious matters and move to discussions of said pictures and the conversation would have been successfully derailed.

eventually the serious people learned to just ignore these derail attempts and persistently continue on in their serious conversations. the unserious people, however, were not admitting defeat and started to employ subtle tactics by contributing to the conversation in a serious way in order to build credibility, but then offering one or more links that were allegedly relevant to the point they were making. when the serious forum goers clicked on the link, they found themselves taken to pictures that were completely irrelevant to the topic and sometimes a discussion about the irrelevance would emerge to once again successfully derail the discussion.

the most common meme for these derail attempts were often pictures of ducks on skates, skateboards or wheels of some kind which the unserious derailers dubbed "duck rolls."

as inane as the images of ducks on wheels were, the serious forum goers could only stomach one, maybe two discussions about the cutely bizarre pictures and then they learned to ignore them as they did with the earlier unsubtle derail attempts.

clearly the unserious people needed a weapon of mass distraction that could weather multiple discussions and maintain it's power to derail conversations.

some enterprising and young unserious forum goer* happened to be digging into the video archives of the distant past and stumbled upon an 80s era video of Rick Astley's song "Never Gonna Give You Up." this forum goer realized immediately that this was the weapon he and his fellow unserious forum goers had been looking for and "the rick roll" was born.

the rick roll seems to have the perfect qualities to repeatedly be effective at derailing conversations. first, the song is actually pretty decent as 80s era love songs go, so it's not painful enough to make one turn it off immediately. on the other hand, the video itself has the kind of gut wrenching quality most closely associated with train wrecks.

the video consists of rick astley pseudo-dancing while singing his song intermixed with images of professional dancers doing random dance moves with little coreography. it's almost as if rick said "well, i dance like a white guy, so let's get some pros in here and have them do all that professional dance stuff. i want people to leap off walls and spin around in circles and all that crap."

another surreal quality to the video is the contrast of how rick astley looks with the rich baritone of his voice. when you first see this red headed doogie howser on the screen you absolutely do not expect to hear the quality of the voice present in the song, yet there it is.

all these factors lead one to realize that the people in the video don't realize how embarrassed they should be while doing embarrassing stuff. there is a natural "what were they thinking?!" quality much like looking at old/new pictures of people in bell bottoms and/or parachute pants. you want so badly to avert your eyes, but you have to watch the video just to see how bad it's going to get and therein lies the essence of the rick roll as a successful forum derail tool.

* attempts to verify the young and/or enterprising nature of the unserious forum goer were unsuccessful.

EDIT: i thought these were kinda funny:
barack roll
news anchor april fools

apparently youtube linked all videos to a rick roll on april 1. awesome!