I’ve just been listening to a discussion on t’wireless about Friday’s Rickmobbing of Liverpool Street Station in London. They were desperate to make sense of it all. I was laughing into my late night bowl of Coco-pops at them going on about not getting it, or assuming it’s all some viral publicity campaign for the re-release of the record. It isn’t! It’s a thousand people all having a laugh and enjoying themselves.
Ok, just to fill you in if you’re a virgin to this whole Rick Astley thing.. .
Firstly, there was ‘Flash mobbing‘. This is where random collections of people who don’t know each other all descend on a particular place but are mingling in the crowd. At a precise given time, they all start performing a specific action. The ‘action’ might be to all start mooing or pretending they are goats, or whatever. At another precise time they stop, and immediately dissolve back into the crowd.
There’s now also this Rickrolling phenomena that won’t go away. It was at first the art of giving people spurious links on t’internet that would always end up at a video of Rick Astley singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ rather than the ‘hot pictures of John McCririck nude’ or whatever had been the promise. This has also mutated into a protest song, typically sung outside the Church of Scientology’s indoctrination and recruiting centres which are now regularly ‘Rickrolled’.
So, you get ‘Flashmobbing‘ and ‘Rickrolling‘ and you put them together and you have ‘Rickmobbing‘.
Yep, random people getting together in a given place and at a given time all suddenly starting to sing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. That’s what Liverpool Street station got treated to on Friday (11th April).
And the media just doesn’t get it. Commentators are discussing the psychology of it, or trying to. They’re writing about it. Debating it. Dissecting it. But, in the end they just don’t get it. In their world everything has to make sense, and this just doesn’t.
Well, good, I say. This is something that can’t be picked apart and analysed by late night ‘experts’ nor should it be. It is something fun that should be encouraged, enjoyed and joined in with. And that’s all it is.
Ok, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ will be number one in a couple of weeks, and commentators will say this Rickmobbing was all a plot by those involved in remixing / re-releasing the song to engineer that. But they’ll be wrong. Rick will be there because of the power of the people to make it so. Not because they love the song, far from it. It’ll be because it was fun to make it so. A laugh. And, the song was re-mixed / re-released because of the rickrolling and rickmobbing and not t’other way round. Power to the people, man!
Blimey, we so need a radio station in tune with this. When was the last time a radio station managed to get a mob to Liverpool Street station?
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