(Yet to be resurrected by the retro gods, the aesthetics of that decade were still at their nadir of fashionability.) But in its day, “Never Gonna Give You Up” was a pop phenomenon of rare distinction. If you’d heard of him, you might well have written him off as an eighties flash-in-the-pan. It was then quite easy to be unaware of the song, and indeed of Astley himself, given that he’d burnt out and retired from the music business in the mid-nineteen-nineties. Nor could you even find it on Youtube nor, come to that, could you find anything on Youtube, since it didn’t exist. You’ve got to remember that, two decades ago, Astley’s debut single “Never Gonna Give You Up” hadn’t yet racked up a billion views on Youtube. The song of which I speak is, of course, “Together Forever.” Even before I’d heard its whole three and a half minutes, I was hooked. Intrigued by the contrast of the unabashed nineteen-eighties production, equally energetic and synthetic, against Astley’s powerful, unusually textured voice, I went straight to AudioGalaxy for the MP3. I was in high school at the time, and it was on a weekend-morning cable-TV binge that I happened first to hear his music - albeit just a few seconds of it - on a commercial for one of those order-by-phone nostalgia compilations. It was an isolating existence, being a Rick Astley fan at the turn of the millennium.
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