I Just Wanna Tell You How I'm Feeling, Gotta Make You Understand

Another day passes and I still haven't been Rick-Rolled.
I wait 10 years for an internet scam to come along that I would quite enjoy and it just doesn't happen.
Somebody, anybody, Rick-Roll me!'

'Never Gonna Give You Up' is one of the truly great pop songs. And I'm not 'admitting' to liking it as though it were a guilty secret. I've always liked it and I think there are good reasons to like it.
Yes, it's what used to be called 'bubblegum pop'. Yes, it was a five-minute wonder. And yes, it has little musical merit.
The lyrics are as banal as many pop songs but they do the job.
And compared to these:
"Love, love me do.
You know I love you,
I'll always be true,
So please, love me do."
they could almost be Sondheim.
What a loss Lennon and McCartney were to Hallmark Greetings Cards.

One night twenty years ago, a drunken, love-sick youth sang 'Never Gonna Give You Up' very loudly below my window late into the night, pausing only to vomit on the pavement.
No, he wasn't singing it to me. Well, obviously not or I would have dragged him inside after the first two verses.
He was presumably singing it to his girlfriend who had made her excuses and left after (a) he started singing or (b) threw up over her shoes.
But that vignette sums up the song for me. No, you cynical bastards, not because it makes me vomit but because it's a song about First Love in all its deluded optimism.

First Love is always forever. You're never gonna tell a lie or make them cry or say goodbye or let them down or run around. (Those song-writing solicitors, Stock, Aitken and Waterman, certainly knew how to rhyme).
It's the only time when there isn't a little voice in your head telling you not to be so fucking stupid and warning you that it will probably end in tears.

If you were a teenager in the eighties you could take it at face value and sing along after eight pints of Heineken.
If, like me, you were just a little older, you could simply enjoy its repetitive, upbeat optimism and fondly recall the time you would have believed every clichéd word of it.

I still like it.
I always will.
And if no bastard is going to Rick-Roll me, I might be reduced to shouting requests out the window when the pubs throw out.
You never know, the vomiting youth of twenty years ago might pass by again. I wonder how many lies he's told, how many people he's made cry and how many times he's said goodbye in the intervening years? And has his singing improved?
Questions to ponder as I wash the vomit from my doorstep.