Rick Astley
Never Gonna Give You Up

Hello guys, today we leave behind the notes of Italy and ideally dive across the Channel towards the lands of Albion and their music.

While we're at it, let's take our De_Lorean and go back to the '80s (specifically: in 1987), to some smoky suburban bar in the Belpaese, with foosball tables, awkward girls, sandwiches, Timberland, Moncler, or with some leather jackets and pointed shoes, and let's indulge in our favorite video games, like Double Dragon, Mexico 86, Tiger Road, or others.

A jukebox spreads music and rhythm in our little bar, while our gaze wanders from the screen of the coin-ups to the sculpted torsos of the awkward girls, as well as their legs clad in leggings and their lacquered blonde perms.

The soundtrack of this afternoon, like others, is the soul/rythm'n'blues of the young English singer Rick Astley who, despite being about twenty when he recorded this his first album, was already distinguished by a powerful and almost tenor-like voice, emulating American colored singers and the vast plains stretching from Tennessee to Oklahoma, passing through Cento, Trecate, Druento, or Roverbella.

The leading track of this single-mini album, presented in all the tracks with various arrangements and mixes, is the most famous piece of this young singer, who at the time, won the hearts of young girls and even impressed, for once, the critics, thanks to a rather professional vocal setup, detached from the electropop in vogue back then, and a skillful nod to the stax-motown tradition of the '50s and '60s, making Astley appealing both to teenagers and their parents or the adult audience in general.

It was a song for all tastes, also programmed by the radios and the then-powerful Dj Television, characterized by a success capable of overwhelming the good Astley and progressively pushing him into anonymity in a few months or at most years. The rhythm that distinguishes the verses of the piece runs in rapid crescendo towards the explosive and dynamic refrain, where Astley's voice indeed stands out as one of the most interesting in commercial music of the decade, with an extremely effective mood, easy and pleasant to listen to.

As always, however, I'm not here to praise the good old days, or to encourage you to revive or reevaluate pieces of radio pop now fallen into oblivion or of some former awkward girl in her forties and their companions, but I want to offer some critical insights regarding this music and the reasons why Astley, or other singers of the era, had little or no luck crossing over to the next decade.

I believe that, objectively, the reasons should be sought in the lack of talent of these individuals, beyond their vocal qualities, and, in any case, in the lack of courage of the record labels, which raised medium-good (sometimes terrible) artists like battery chickens, clipping their qualities and throwing them into the fray for a season or a little longer. They were people who rarely wrote their own songs, exploiting the obscure work of the songwriters of the individual record labels, and who often repeated themselves for short seasons, never daring anything. In short, they were short-term investments, calibrated to achieve the maximum commercial response with the minimum economic outlay, destined to become in a few years trash titles (a bit like subprime mortgages), replaced by other guys and girls of a similar origin and similar success... until the next round of the merry-go-round.

Sure, the less savvy public flocked in large numbers, airplay benefited, but the career and expectations of many artists, not exceptional but certainly honest like Astley, were progressively penalized, even relegating characters like our man into the pot of trash or the '80s revival.

Setting aside the nostalgia effect, and making the usual, equitable, assessment regarding the quality of the product in question, I can only highlight a certain fundamental banality, both in the rhythmic textures and in Astley's voice itself (in the end... a "one-sixteenth" soul man), ultimately tiresome and hardly suitable to withstand the wear of time, except for revivals like the ones you are reading now.

The whole barely reaches sufficiency, with a 2/5 rating out of courtesy.

From the distant past, always Yours

Il_Paolo