New York Mets fall victim to Rick Astley online prank

For many years the Mets were New York's underdog team, the scrappy poorer cousins of the wealthy Yankees. Now, it seems, they have unwittingly chosen an underdog of their own, a long-neglected 1980s English pop star, to represent them.

When the baseball team asked fans to vote online for a new eighth-inning sing-along tune, five million voters bypassed classic American hits like Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer and Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, instead writing in ballots for a chart-topper from a 1980s Lancastrian pop star.

New Yorkers, it seemed, thought Rick Astley’s 1987 hit Never gonna give you up would best rally their team.
It was only when chatrooms and blogs began buzzing with reports of the 42-year-old Lancastrian’s surprise success that organisers realised they had been “rickrolled”.
The baseball team has become the latest victim of the online prank that aims to play the song, which topped UK charts for five weeks in 1987, as often as possible.
Shortly after the Mets posted the poll on their website last week, online communities including fark.com and digg.com rallied their readers to vote for Astley’s song, swamping the team's website with votes for the 1980s hit.

Rather than commit to the results, however, the New York team will stage a run-off of the top six songs, including Livin’ on a Prayer, Sweet Caroline, The Monkees' I’m a Believer, Billy Joel's Movin’ Out, and Build Me Up Buttercup by The Foundations.

Rickrolling started as an online in-joke: community members posted links with enticing titles, luring readers in with offers of celebrities or sex, or both, but the link was, in fact, directed to YouTube clips of the camp pop star’s dated music video.

As the phenomenon has grown, the song has been revived as a widespread in-joke in the real world, too, and has been played at sporting events and protests alike in “live rickrolling” events. Last month four women's basketball games at Eastern Washington University were rickrolled, and anti-Scientology protesters blasted the song from boomboxes in London, Edinburgh, New York and Washington.

Rickrolling is only the latest, and perhaps most popular, example of the Internet “meme”, the repetitive transmission of ideas across the web, and follows the more rudimentary duckroll, in which readers were re-directed to an image of a duck on wheels.

The 42-year-old Englishman seems slightly bemused by the rickrolling phenomenon.

“If this had happened around some kind of rock song, with a lyric that really meant something -- a Bruce Springsteen, 'God bless America' ... or an anti-something kind of song, I could kind of understand that,” Astley told the LA Times Web Scout blog.

“But for something as, and I don’t mean to belittle it, because I still think it’s a great pop song, but it’s a pop song; do you know what I mean? It doesn’t have any kind of weight behind it, as such. But maybe that’s the irony of it.”