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Student’s Essay Sneakily Rickrolls Professor

Rickrolling , generally a digital bait-and-switch , involves tricking someone into viewing or hearing the Rick Astley song, “ Never Gonna Give You Up .” When redditor Mayniac182 was certain a computer class teacher didn’t actually read through students’ work, the redditor decided to hide the lyrics to “Never Gonna Give You Up” within a paper. Check out the full essay below, as well as Mayniac182’s full explanation.

Explanation:

Everyone in my computing class is certain the teacher doesn’t actually go through ANY work we hand in. So I’ve been up for the last few hours crafting this . The first paragraph started as an idea to use ridiculously complex words to confuse him (English is his second language), do that for a bit then just go Fresh Prince on him, but that got boring. If you want to read through it all and figure out what I’ve done to it (aside from writing complete bullshit), read through it now and don’t read the next line. Read the first word of every line that touches the left margin (so everything that isn’t indented). It’s taken eight cups of coffee, but I finally did it. Rickrolling my computing teacher in style. EDIT : I handed it in just over an hour ago. Next lesson is on Friday, but I doubt he’ll ever give it back. If he does, it will probably just have a few ticks on it or something. I’ll do a follow up if he finds the Rickrolling though.

Click on the image below to see a larger version.

( reddit via BuzzFeed )

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How Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” Went from 80s Pop Smash to Bastion of Internet Culture: A Short Documentary

in History , Music | October 14th, 2022 Leave a Comment

It was an isolating existence, being a Rick Astley fan at the turn of the millennium. 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. 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. Even before I’d heard its whole three and a half minutes, I was hooked. The song of which I speak is, of course, “Together Forever.”

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. Nor could you even find it on Youtube; nor, come to that, could you find anything on Youtube, since it didn’t exist. 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. If you’d heard of him, you might well have written him off as an eighties flash-in-the-pan. (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.

The short Vice documentary above recounts how Astley became an overnight sensation, bringing in the singer himself as well as his original production team: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, the trio who created the sound of British eighties pop. It was while playing with a band in his small northern hometown that Astley caught Stock Aitken Waterman’s ear, and soon thereafter he found himself working as a “tea boy” in their London studio. At that time he lived at Waterman’s home, and after overhearing the latter screaming at his girlfriend through his giant eighties phone , he made a fateful remark: “You’re never gonna give her up, are you?”

From there, “Never Gonna Give You Up” seems practically to have written itself, though its producers admit to having ill sensed its potential during recording. Shelved for a time, the song was finally included on a magazine mix tape, at which point it went the eighties equivalent of viral: airplay on the independent Capital London soon crossed over to a variety of mainstream radio formats. “They hadn’t got a clue that he was a white guy,” says Waterman, nor, as Astley himself adds, that he “looked about eleven years old.” All was soon revealed by the music video — then still a novel form — hastily and somewhat amateurishly produced in the wake of the single’s chart-topping success.

These not-unappealing incongruities inspired one of my fellow Millennials, a young enlisted man named Sean Cotter, to relaunch Astley’s hit into the zeitgeist in 2007. “I immediately knew I wanted to make this thing into a meme,” he says, and so he invented “rickrolling,” the prank of sending an unrelated-looking link that actually leads to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video. Despite originating in a spirit of mockery, it enabled the comeback Astley had been tentatively attempting in the preceding years. Today, at a distance from the eighties and the two-thousands alike, we can finally hear “Never Gonna Give You Up” for what it is: an inspired work of pop songcraft that reflects the distinctive appeal of both its era and its performer — or as Astley puts it, “a bloody hit, man.”

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How to Easily Tackle a “Never Give Up Essay”

The attitude towards a never give up essay differs among various students. Some feel that this is a motivational paper which has been exhaustively written on by many renowned authors.

However, what many students forget is that there is no monopoly of ideas. That one new idea that they would bring on board in a “never gonna give you up essay” might be all that someone else has been yearning to hear. That leads us to the sole purpose of this post, to bring you to that point of making a unique paper that would give hope to many on the verge of giving up.

Essential Tips on the Structure of a Never Give Up Essay

Never give up essay titles play a critical role in the reception of your paper. For you to catch, not only the eyes but hearts of many, the title should be:

Unique A Catchy Hook In line with the tone of your essay Of interest to you and the reader too!

Introduction

A top-grade essay on never give up introduction paragraph should be both engaging and informative. It should be able to connect with the reader’s current state of emotion or feeling at first glance. Your introduction should:

First, give the context and background Set up the scope and purpose of your essay Show the reader that he/she is in the right place

Have you ever read or heard about the importance of an oasis in a desert? Well, your essay body should be more or less the same – quenching the thirst of your reader sufficiently. The never give up a paragraph that makes up the organisation provides the real chunk of meat. You can achieve this by using:

Real-life experiences Surprising facts or statistics Human interest occurrences that relate to the situation

You should also choose the right words for never giving up.

The Conclusion

One dirty little secret that you can use here is a punch line, for example: “Take the blow, get back up, and punch it back.” Make the reader see how all that comes to us in this life can make them who they want to be.

Now to the most anticipated essay example!

Sample Speech on Never Give up on Your Dreams “We all have dreams on our minds, but hardly do we manage to achieve them in our first attempt. There is nothing as sweet as dreaming, you know why? Dreaming is all about what we love and hope for the most. But do you know what is the most adorable in all these? Making dreams a reality! There is only one making this happen – by never giving up! It implies that you do not let your failures be a stumbling block, but rather act as your stepping stone. I remember the story of Albert Einstein, who made 1000 attempts to make a light bulb. True to his resilience, there was light at the end of the tunnel. My father was the firstborn in a family of four. He grew up in a humble background where having two meals a day would call for a grand celebration. Being raised by a single mother, the siblings grew up knowing nothing but the smell of poverty. It must have saturated their minds and reached to their lungs. When he was around ten years old, their mother passed on, leaving them as orphans. It meant that life for them had to take a different turn. Being the firstborn, my father had to take up the leadership mantle for the three siblings. He would move from bin to bin and collect as many leftovers as possible. In the evening, the four would have their “feast.” After that, they would resort to their cartoons in anticipation for yet another day. However, my father had a dream, and no one was going to shutter it. He wanted to be an aeronautical engineer at all costs. Therefore, he would visit the airport daily and watch the planes take off and land. One day, a certain man pulled over by him and rolled down his tinted Prado car window. “Young man,” he began, “I have noticed that you are always here. What is it that you want?” Without hesitation, my father let out his dream, “I want to be an aeronautical engineer.” The man sighed a bit and told him, “Well, then, your dream has just become true.”

The man was the head of the engineering department at the airport. He took my father in and enrolled him in the engineering classes. The rest is history!

To sum up, never give up, use every obstacle to better yourself and pursue your dream!”

Also, you can get custom writing help on a speech about never giving up and more! Reach us today for more information.

The Curious Meaning of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Not many 1980s pop songs have inspired a world-famous meme, but ‘ Never Gonna Give You Up ’ by Rick Astley certainly has that claim to fame. The song – one of the catchiest of tunes released through the powerhouse that was Stock Aitken and Waterman – is often derided and dismissed, but it deserves more credit than it usually gets.

Why? Let’s take a closer look at the meaning of ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’, and the ingredients that go into making this such a memorable and infectious number.

‘Never Gonna Give You Up’: song meaning

The song is a love song in which the singer pledges his commitment to his beloved. He acknowledges that they’ve both been in love before and they know what’s expected. They’re not in it for messing around any more. And the singer is prepared to commit fully to his sweetheart. Indeed, he believes he’s the only one who can promise her complete devotion.

The chorus to the song, with its use of the rhetorical device of anaphora (whereby the same word or words are repeated at the beginnings of successive clauses: here, ‘never gonna …, never gonna …’), sees the singer list eight ways in which he is going to make good on his promise to commit to her.

He will never give up on her or disappoint her. He will never cheat on her or desert her when she needs him. He’ll never make her unhappy, never leave her, never lie to her, and never hurt her.

The second verse reveals that he and his beloved have known each other a long time, and she has liked him for a while, but she’s been too shy to broach the issue with him. But she knows him well, so she can surely see that he’s sincere and he means every word when he pledges his devotion to her.

‘Never Gonna Give You Up’: analysis

The lyrics to this Stock Aitken and Waterman track may not be poetry, but the song is a classic example of what the Hit Factory did so well: it’s a song in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Read the lyrics on the page, and we feel we’re reading some earnest teenager’s attempt at poetry for his sweetheart, telling her how much she means to him. Listen to the bass line and it’s certainly infectious, but nothing more on its own.

But when the music, lyrics, and – perhaps most importantly – Rick Astley’s deep and soulful voice are put together, a track like ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ becomes an earworm to devour all other earworms, the kind of song that evokes memories and inspires wannabe love poets all over the world the first time it’s heard, but with the strange potential to become, on the tenth or twelfth play, the sort of track they might play to detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

So ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ succeeds by a kind of alchemy, whereby the various ingredients add up to something that manages to transcend the individual units that constitute it. Is it art? No. Is it great pop? Indubitably.

Rick Astley had been playing in a band for several years (initially as the drummer) before he became lead vocalist and came to the attention of Stock Aitken and Waterman, who signed him to their record label – originally, so it is said, as the ‘tea boy’. His rich, soulful voice is undoubtedly part of the song’s success: one cannot imagine a cover version working for this reason (although Brian from Family Guy made a heroic attempt).

And if ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ reminds you of another 1980s song, it’s probably Colonel Abrams’ 1985 hit ‘ Trapped ’: another track with a deep lead vocal and a heavy bassline. Indeed, ‘Trapped’ would prove to be an important influence on the later track.

In 2007, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ was given a new lease of life thanks to Rickrolling : that phenomenon whereby an internet link sends an unsuspecting web-user to the video for Astley’s song.

Although such a meme was presumably dreamt up on the basis that there is something slightly naff about the 1987 song, it’s actually aged surprisingly well – especially when placed alongside some other Stock Aitken Waterman efforts like the Reynolds Girls’ ‘ I’d Rather Jack ’.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Personal Growth and Development — The Power of Never Giving Up

The Power of Never Giving Up

Categories: Personal Growth and Development

About this sample

Words: 559 |

Published: Feb 7, 2024

Words: 559 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Ntroduction, the power of perseverance, benefits of never giving up, overcoming obstacles, the role of mindset, the importance of support systems.

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Never Give Up Essay | Never Give Up Example Essay and Importance of Never Giving Up

August 27, 2021 by Prasanna

Never Give Up Essay: There comes that second in the entirety of our lives when we feel like totally giving up when nothing appears to go the manner in which we arranged, and the future looks depressing, best case scenario. On occasions such as these, we can’t resist the opportunity to feel that there can’t be motivated to continue to attempt; all things considered, why in dealing with something when you realize it will be purposeless eventually? However, to be reasonable, it is never a smart thought to simply give up, not until you have given your best into the circumstance.

To never give up intends to stand up and attempt once again in any event, when you totally feel like you can’t do and are enticed to stop. Whether or not you delayed down or not, you should continue to attempt. One of the principal drivers of accomplishment is determination, steadiness and a goal to continue to attempt. In any event, when your body throbs and the scars appear to be wearing you out; don’t acknowledge to you to stop. Try not to deny your fantasies. Protect instead of being sluggish and allowing cynicism to negatively affect you. We will in general take in these negative indecencies from the general public, our environmental factors and our friends. Try not to permit your current circumstance to dive you into despair; rather consistently have trust that thusly energizes steadiness.

You can read more Essay Writing about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Essay on Never Give Up

Never give up is the disposition that one should convey and live his/her existence with, regardless of the circumstance is. One should continue battling and battling with the chances and should sit tight for the day when he/she will discover what he/she has really been searching for in his/her life.

Disappointment isn’t a possibility for anybody. Despite the fact that you have fizzled in any interaction, you should stand up and rehash it, one way or the other, you ought to never abandon your fantasies.

One ought to never abandon his/her objectives, and one ought to never abandon a battle that he/she is accomplishing for achieving something which is vital throughout everyday life. This mentality has incredible significance in our lives. To never give up is an ethic that relatively few individuals have.

One point that each person should keep in his/her brain is that no one in this whole world is awesome and nobody could at any point be. Everybody commits errors, and it isn’t the missteps that exacerbate you than others; it is your conduct after those slip-ups. Assuming you right those slip-ups and accomplish your objective, you are the saint, and in the event that you abandon your fantasies only for a misstep that you made, then, at that point, you never had any objective or dream on which you were working in any case.

One ought to consistently recall that regardless of whether you are buckling down for your objectives, there would consistently be an individual who is working much harder for the comparable objectives and it is on you whether you need him/her to win or you will contend energetically and win it for yourself.

Achievement isn’t everybody’s favourite thing in the world. It requires heaps of restless days and evenings, bunches of sweat and a lot of difficult work and it must be accomplished on the off chance that you never abandon the little disappointments that you will look all the while.

On the off chance that you give up after your first disappointment, you will know what you fouled up, yet you won’t ever get familiar with the correct method to get things done. Each time you commit an error and neglect to accomplish your objective, you will know something more that ought not to be finished. Along these lines, by the interaction of disposal alone, you will continue to draw nearer to your objective, lastly, show up at an idiot-proof approach to finish things.

In the event that you abandon your objective after a solitary attempt, or without attempting by any means, you won’t ever know the correct method of getting things done. Disappointments reveal to us that we are accomplishing something incorrectly, compelling us to change follow and learn new things simultaneously. We need to remain refreshed in case we are to hold tight to our fantasies, on the grounds that there is no reason for doing likewise and rehashing our errors. By dealing with various approaches to finish something, we accomplish flawlessness, turning into a specialist in our field simultaneously.

You can foster the idea of not giving up by tolerating that you can be tenacious, appreciating its significance and having clear objectives. Fortunately, you needn’t bother with the extraordinary ability to persevere until you accomplish your goal. With training, difficult work and assurance, you can have everything necessary to continue to attempt till you get what you need.

FAQ’s on Never Give Up Essay

Question 1. Why one should never give up?

Answer: Never giving up permits you to refute others. At the point when somebody advises you to accomplish nothing, buckle down without giving up and you will refute them. Diligence fabricates certainty for your future undertakings. finish different activities in the future.

Question 2. Why it is important not to give up?

Answer: We become familiar with a ton when we continue onward and choose not to give up. We can discover that there are covered-up strengths and possibilities inside us. We figure out how to keep ourselves roused. All the more critically, we choose not to give up, and we figure out how we can successfully change our disappointments over to progress.

Question 3. What is the attitude of never give up?

Answer: A never-give-up demeanour assists you with becoming versatile to disappointment and focused on your objectives. There will be no other alternative than to proceed in whatever else you do throughout everyday life. Stopping is estranged and the assurance to complete what was begun becomes more grounded.

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How the Iconic Rick Astley Song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ Became the Infamous ‘Rickroll’ Meme

September 18, 2024

Rick Astley spoke with Vice about his experience recording his hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up”, how the song was written, how it shot to number one, and how the sudden fame and fortune caused him to step away from the music business forever, at least that’s what he thought.

A lot of the things that I really loved about music and wanting to make music had no relevance anymore. I just felt like a traveling salesman who could be selling nuts, to be honest. …Taking somebody who is in obscurity and turning them into a face that the world recognizes in an extremely short period of time is not good for people. It does actually kill people. …I want to be at home with my daughter, you know. I was literally on the motorway.I said, “We’re going to have to turn around. I need to go home.” And that’s what I did.

That should have been the end of it, but in 2007, Shawn Cotter , a Master Sergeant in the United States Air Force invented the infamous “Rickroll” meme.

In 2007, I was a young military airman. I had a passion for computers and Internet and meme culture, and I was trying to be a YouTuber at the time. I first discovered “Never Gonna Give You Up” …I immediately knew that I wanted to make this thing into a meme.There was a common meme on the Internet called the Duck Roll. You get a link sent to you and you get this picture of just a duck with wheels and it just says “duckroll.” Duck Roll became Rick Roll.

This led to Astley’s comeback and an appreciation for who is is now.

The Rick Roll is a joke, but I’ve never taken it personally that people are taking the piss out of me. They might be making a joke about that guy in that video, but that isn’t personal to the person I am today or have been for 30 years, really… It’s been great in terms of getting people to kind of hear that song.

Astley has also embraced the song itself.

And “Never Gonna Give You Up” is my biggest song, always has been, always will be. There’s just no getting away from it. And I’ve sort of come full circle and now can embrace it for what it is fully.

Astley Spoke With Larry King About the Meme

Astley Performing the Song at Glastonbury 2023

Lori is a Laughing Squid Contributing Editor based in New York City who has been writing blog posts for over a decade. She also enjoys making jewelry , playing guitar , taking photos and mixing craft cocktails .

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Never Gonna Give You Up, Lyrics, Meaning & Analysis

"Never Gonna Give You Up" encapsulates a sincere pledge of love and commitment. The lyrics delve into the Rick Astley's acknowledgment of past romantic experiences, portraying a maturity in understanding the expectations of love. The anaphoric chorus serves as a powerful declaration, with the repetition of "never gonna" reinforcing the singer's unwavering promise. This rhetorical device not only adds a poetic quality to the lyrics but also emphasizes the depth of the commitment being made.

Never Gonna Give You Up Lyrics

We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I (do I) A full commitment's what I'm thinking of You wouldn't get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you We've known each other for so long Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it (say it) Inside, we both know what's been going on (going on) We know the game and we're gonna play it And if you ask me how I'm feeling Don't tell me you're too blind to see Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you We've known each other for so long Your heart's been aching, but you're too shy to say it (to say it) Inside, we both know what's been going on (going on) We know the game and we're gonna play it I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

Critical Appreciation of "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley

Song meaning, lyric analysis, musical analysis, success and alchemy, cultural impact, comparative analysis.

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Entertainment /
Internet Culture

Thanks to the Rickroll, ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ hits 1 billion YouTube plays

All those clicked links have brought us here.

By Chris Welch , a reviewer specializing in personal audio and home theater. Since 2011, he has published nearly 6,000 articles, from breaking news and reviews to useful how-tos.

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The official video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” has surpassed 1 billion plays on YouTube. The song became a lasting part of internet culture thanks to the Rickroll meme and reached the impressive milestone a couple days ago. Astley took to the video’s comments to share his gratitude, saying “amazing, crazy, wonderful!” In a video posted to Instagram, he added “the world is a wonderful and beautiful place, and I am very lucky.”

With some songs having crossed as many as 7 billion views in recent years, the 1 billion club isn’t quite as prestigious as it once was. But the achievement goes to show the staying power of the Rickroll prank. The video hit daily views of 2.3 million on April Fools Day, according to Billboard . Just in the past couple years, there have been Fortnite emotes and fan-made 4K remasters .

Back in 2008, the man himself Rickrolled the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade . The meme was also put to excellent use when the San Diego Padres trolled the Boston Red Sox just as fans thought they were about to belt out the chorus to “Sweet Caroline.” If you’ve got other prime examples, the comments section awaits.

I’m curious what the average watch time is for “Never Gonna Give You Up.” After being duped, how many people have closed out the window in aggravation within seconds of hearing the drum intro and synths coming in?

Astley celebrated joining the billion plays club by releasing a limited, already-sold-out run of 7-inch blue vinyl pressings of the quintessential ‘80s jam.

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Teacher Rickrolled by inspired quantum physics essay

The chorus was secreted in the column of text, article bookmarked.

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The student declined to say what mark his essay got

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Breathing life into a very old meme, physics student Sairam Gudiseva Rickrolled his teacher in spectacular fashion, inserting every word of Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up into an essay.

Getting each word to line up with the margin would be no mean feat with any piece of writing, let alone an assessment of the influence of Danish scientist Niels Bohr on quantum theory.

The student posted a picture of his submission on Twitter , with the parts that were more Astley than Gudiseva highlighted (though it's not clear whether this was the work of the teacher, or whether the Rickroll went unnoticed).

Read the essay in full here .

Perhaps the best known example of interpolating song lyrics where they don't belong came from BBC presenter Chris Packham, who over a number of years slipped Smiths' song names into episodes of Springwatch .

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A red record plays music as a hand reaches over to make it stop.

Why Can’t I Get This Song Out of My Head?

Here’s why earworms are never gonna give you up.

Credit... Eric Helgas for The New York Times

Supported by

By Melinda Wenner Moyer

Sept. 10, 2024

Q: I have had a Kacey Musgraves song stuck in my head for two weeks and it’s making me crazy. Why is this happening?

First, some reassurance: You’re not alone. Research suggests that catchy songs that get lodged in your head — colloquially known as earworms — are common, and can happen to people weekly or even daily .

“Some people wander around with music in their head kind of constantly,” said Ira Hyman, a psychologist who studies the phenomenon at Western Washington University in Washington State.

Scientists don’t fully understand why earworms are so hard to shake. But certain songs are more likely than others to set up shop in our heads . And the propensity to catch them can depend on what you’ve recently listened to and what you’re doing.

Here’s what we know.

What causes an earworm?

It probably comes as no surprise that the songs that insert themselves into our brains are typically songs we’ve recently listened to.

But it’s also possible to get an earworm after hearing a word or sound — or even experiencing a situation — that reminds you of a particular song , said Callula Killingly, a postdoctoral research fellow who studies earworms at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

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Rickrolled: Student pranks his physics teacher by inserting lyrics to Rick Astley’s 'Never Going to Give You Up' into paper on quantum mechanics

Sairam Gudiseva's started every line of his text with word from the 1987 hit
Student's 'Rickrolling' stunt retweeted thousands of times

By Tom Gardner

Published: 11:47 BST, 17 January 2014 | Updated: 15:29 BST, 17 January 2014

View comments

Getting to grips with the complicated works of a Nobel prize winning physicist can be difficult enough.

But a student's short biography of scientist Niels Bohr has gone viral on the internet after he also managed to weave the lyrics from a Rick Astley song into the text under the nose of his professor.

Sairam Gudiseva's boast on Twitter that he had 'Rick Rolled my physics teacher...', posting an accopmanying photograph of his essay with the verse from the 1987 hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up' written with the first word on every line.

Going viral: Student Sairam Gudiseva posted a picture of an essay which had the song lyrics from Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up weaved into the text

The tweet has been retweeted nearly 18,000 times since being uploaded four days ago.

Interwoven among details of the Danish physicist, who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, were the words: 'Never going to give you up, never going to let you down, never going to run around and desert you, never going to make you cry, never going to say goodbye, never going to tell you a lie.'

His friends on the social network were quick to praise his ingenuity about being able to craft the essay from the lyrics with enough subtlety to avoid his teacher noticing.

Prank: Sairam Gudiseva's science essay has gone viral after he managed to work in a Rick Astley son into the text

Boasting: Sairam Gudiseva managed to slip song verse, highlighted in yellow down the left side of the page, into his essay without his professor realising

The University student at South Harmon Institute of Technology, Missouri, was latching on to an Internet meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song which went to number one in the charts in 25 countries.

To carry off the prank, people attempt to insert something to do with the Rick Astley hit into a video or text on a totally unrelated topic without the viewer being immediately aware.

The prank was first dreamed up in May 2007 and took off across the internet.

Hayday: Rick Astley's 1987 pop hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up' has been used in an internet prank call Rickrolling

The musician himself even took part in a Rickrolling stunt by interrupting a float in the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York with a rendition of his song.

A string of famous people have been the bait for a Rickrolling attempt - including U.S. President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.

Praise: The prank won Sairam Gudiseva gushing praise from some of his twitter followers

Crafty: Sairam Gudiseva's successful 'Rickrolling' of his teacher impressed his twitter followers

In 2008, a number of political blogs posted an article claiming to show Michelle Obama going on a rant full of racist references to 'Whitey', but the video was actually a Rickroll.

Hugh Atkin, an Australian lawyer and notable producer of Internet viral videos, created a popular YouTube parody video of the rickrolling meme involving U.S. President Barack Obama while he was running for the White House in 2008.

The video consists of clips of Obama speaking the words of Astley's song and scenes of his appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Share or comment on this article: Student rickrolls his physics teacher inserting lyrics into paper on quantum mechanics

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MOST READ IN DETAIL

With epic Rickroll, physics student becomes the master

Never gonna forget quantum theory..

Kevin Collier

It’s only January, but we’ve got an early contender for the best tweet of 2014.

Student Sairam Gudiseva tweeted a term paper on Friday that doubles as an epic prank: In describing Niels Bohr’s career accomplishment for 3rd period physics, he managed to make the first word of every line a consecutive word from the Internet’s favorite song, bard Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Amazingly, the paper is fairly comprehensible, and keeps the jig up for all 40 lines of the song’s Internet-iconic chorus.

Screengrab via Jpaz11346 /YouTube.

Share this article

A former senior politics reporter for the Daily Dot, Kevin Collier focuses on privacy, cybersecurity, and issues of importance to the open internet. Since leaving the Daily Dot in March 2016, he has served as a reporter for Vocativ and a cybersecurity correspondent for BuzzFeed.

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Adrian Nathan West

Never Gonna Give You Up

Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfémi Táíwò. Haymarket Books, 150 pages.

Many white progressives —virtually all the white progressives I know—have, for fear of being thought racist or at least insufficiently anti-racist, abdicated the attempt to formulate or sustain any coherent idea of race. It was fine to insist race was just a social construct when being marked as of a given race was mostly pejorative, calling into question one’s inherent value, abilities, motivations, or right to attain to certain social or professional spheres. But the growing emphasis on “lived experience,” “uplifting voices,” “centering,” and all the other nebulous claptrap that asserts the impossibility of person A ever understanding person B has incentivized the hardening of race into an irreducible aspect of “racialized subjects,” existentially if not biologically inevitable. Where once public figures might have argued against the idea of race as a violation of the basic truth of common humanity, increasingly, thinkers on the nominal left view race as a source of insights inaccessible except through it. And because whiteness is seen as an almost insurmountable barrier to grasping them, the job of the white progressive becomes to “step back and listen.”

This imperative can only be sound if racial experience is uniform and if all subjects belonging to a given race possess the same fidelity in their accounts of their experience. No sane person believes either of these is true. And yet, because so much white progressivism is craven, more concerned with being seen as virtuous than with doing anyone any good, it rarely bothers to try and grasp the diversity of racial experience and the conflicts it gives rise to, let alone vetting those who rely on their racial identity to bolster their ethical or political claims. Instead, what is “centered” are politically amenable perspectives, those easily digested by a value system that heavily favors the symbolic gesture over pragmatic changes that might require real work or compromise. The beneficiaries of this centering are not, by and large, the poor, the imprisoned, or the chronically ill, though race frequently plays a role in such people’s plight; and virtually no one seems to be arguing for a greater role for black conservatives or others unwilling to toe the progressive line.

The winners here are the institution-adjacent: the famous people, writers, “activists,” and professors who feel representative to white progressives even when their views are at odds with those of the majority of blacks (exemplary here is the breach between progressive vanguard support for defunding the police and numerous polls showing most black Americans favor a strong, if reformed, police presence in their communities). Unsurprisingly, this anointment tends to reinforce these figureheads’ wealth and standing in institutional hierarchies.

This is nothing new. The intersectional critique of liberationist thinking has long pointed to the dangers of privileged groups’ annexation of the benefits of broad-based struggles. As Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century , “The central insight of intersectionality is that any liberation movement—feminism, anti-racism, the labor movement—that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of color, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.”

No one who’s achieved the status of thought leader will readily abandon it on the grounds that their wealth and fame have made them lose touch with those whose cause they claim to advance.

The problem is intractable for a number of reasons: first, on average, white people don’t know many people of a different race, and tend to rely on stereotypes shaped by media images filtered through their preexisting political inclinations; second, the asymmetry between the high psychological and social costs of being perceived as racist and the low ones of mouthing support for radical policies that appeal to fellow progressives has led white liberals by and large to abandon scrutiny with respect to minority thinkers, ceding this ground to the increasingly hysterical American right, whose invidious attacks on “Critical Race Theory,” transgender individuals, and other bugbears only further disincline skeptics to proffer more measured critiques; finally, being a spokesperson is profitable, as Sean Kevin Campbell has shown in a series of articles for New York magazine about the finances of the Black Lives Matter Global Network. No one who’s achieved the status of thought leader will readily abandon it on the grounds that their wealth and fame have made them lose touch with those whose cause they claim to advance.

For all these reasons, there’s a need for an earnest critique of the elite appropriation of progressive struggles and its distortionary effects: how elite ends deviate from and are often contrary to the needs of ordinary people. In May of 2020, there was a hint that such a thing would come to be when Olúfémi Taíwò, author of Reconsidering Reparations and a professor at Georgetown University, published his essay “Identity Politics and Elite Capture” in the Boston Review. Taiwò opened with a gibe at former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who had shortly before published an editorial in the Washington Post with vague proposals encouraging Asian-Americans, then suffering a surge of racial prejudice related to the spread of Covid-19, to “demonstrate that we are part of the solution.” Taiwò writes:

The appeal is an example of identity politics, though not of the sort that the terms calls to mind for most people. Identity politics is usually thought of as advocacy on behalf of a group, rooted in the group’s collective victimization. But often, whether by accident or design, identity politics serves a narrower set of interests, such as the electoral goals of a Democratic candidate. Yang’s argument, for instance, tasks the very group targeted by racism with proving itself worthy of being American, while at the same time asking little of the country’s non-Asian majority, whose votes his political future depends upon.

After the de rigueur hat tip to the Combahee River Collective’s original conception of identity politics––which in a number of recent books seems to have taken on the status of an origin myth from which to disparage later uses of the term––Taiwò turns his sights on those who “have chosen to weaponize identity politics, closing ranks—especially on social media—around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests rather than building solidarity.”

To characterize such people, he resorts to the term “elite capture,” a concept from the literature of development studies that describes the way small and well-connected groups arrogate goods or political power, particularly natural resources, their proceeds, and the foreign aid on which many poor countries depend. For Taiwò, the cultural capital overtaken by progressive elites can prove an impediment to the goals progressive politics visualizes. After citing such recent pieces on the subject as Shannon Keating’s “You Wanted Same-Sex Marriage? Now You Have Pete Buttigeig” and The New York Times Magazine’s inadvertently Candide- esque exposé on working conditions at “women’s utopia” The Wing, he calls for the cultivation of the “right kind” of political culture, a politics that takes “shared oppression as a bridge to unite people across difference,” encouraging sympathetic elites to get involved––but “actually involved”––in a way that avoids monopolizing values and sidesteps whatever he means by “the gamification of political life.”

One could blame the essay’s inadequacies on the format––a few thousand words can’t suffice to describe the problems Taiwò addresses, let alone sketch out solutions––and so it was encouraging to imagine these matters would be expanded upon in the book-length essay Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Lamentably, this never quite happens.

It is one thing for Taiwò’s sympathies to be on the side of identity politics, and his affirmation that “the increasing domination of elite interests and control over aspects of our social system” is universal, and not a specific malady of left-wing politics, is important at a moment when the hobgoblin of “coastal elites” has become canonical in American conservative thought.

But his book barely touches on its alleged central theme. Instead, a good half of its pages are devoted to a kind of 2022 Profiles in Courage, with capsule biographies of Paulo Freire, black sociologist Edward Franklin Frazier, Amílcar Cabral, and Cape Verdean activist Lilica Boal. There is a tendentious account of the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies, with barely a mention of their struggles’ place in the proxy wars between the Soviet Union and the United States that enveloped much of the African continent in the 1960s and 1970s; a convoluted series of speculations about Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” that arrives at the unhelpful conclusion that “the problem, it turns out, isn’t the emperor’s townspeople at all, or even the emperor. It’s the town . It’s the empire”; a riff on C. Thi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art , in which we are told on the one hand that games “fail to capture the complications and precarities of daily life” and on the other that game environments are “not so different from the real world as it might seem”; and so on.

An exception to this general diffuseness comes in Taiwò’s critique of deference politics, “which considers it a step toward justice to then modify interpersonal interactions in compliance with the perceived wishes of the marginalized.” His ambivalence with the prioritizing of suppressed or marginalized voices arises from the contexts where these acts of deference take place, which tend to be sites of privilege very difficult to access. Over a billion people in the world are inadequately sheltered, a hundred million are homeless, over two billion lack ready access to clean drinking water, and few if any of these individuals find themselves in the boardrooms or universities where such practices as “progressive stacking” are instituted. Even if those selected (or self-selected) as stand-ins for the oppressed do have experience of oppression or marginalization, they rarely have the power to influence the unjust systems that help create the settings where these enlightened conversations take place.

Taiwò observes trenchantly that “deference to figures from oppressed communities is a performance that sanitizes, apologizes for, or simply distracts from the fact that the deferrer has enough ‘in the room’ privilege for their ‘lifting up’ of a perspective to be of consequence—to reflect well on them .” But then he seems quickly to wish to backtrack for fear of stepping on progressives’ toes. I found myself drawing a question mark in the margins when he presumes that practitioners of standpoint epistemology engage in it “for the right reasons,” and refuses to “attribute bad faith to all or even most of those who practice deferential politics.” Why shouldn’t we assume bad faith? Why should we suppose anyone does things for “the right reasons”? Simply because their beliefs and stated goals nominally align with our own? These questions become doubly salient when he quotes Barack Obama to describe what bottom-up change might look like: Obama, who let off the bankers in 2008, who oversaw an unprecedented concentration of power in tech and retail, and who has spent his retirement years kite-surfing with Richard Branson and exchanging bromides with fellow millionaire Bruce Springsteen on their podcast Renegades.

Anyone who’s ever tried to get a remotely heterogeneous group to agree on pizza toppings will doubt how far consensus politics can take us.

As Elite Capture nears its conclusions, readers may feel exasperated by the contrast between the examples its author proffers as models for progress and his immense vision of which struggles must be waged and how. He belittles the “Whac-A-Mole” approach to injustice embodied by reformism in favor of “a world-making project aimed at building and rebuilding actual structures of social connection and movement,” but his illustrations of how this is to be done hardly transcend the anecdotal. He is inspired by citizen action on the water crisis in Flint but ignores the role of official bodies, the government, and even private donations in addressing it, and paints as an unmitigated success what was in fact a protracted scandal capped by the decision of Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, to drop all criminal charges in the matter. He praises the Rolling Jubilee campaign for raising money to pay off $30 million in debt but offers no clue how that might be scaled up to deal with the $15.6 trillion American households owe. Admitting that Guinea-Bissau has collapsed into a narco-state since achieving independence, he still credits the revolution with raising the country’s literacy rate to “as high as 60 percent” among the young, but this is not especially high for sub-Saharan Africa, and mirrors similar gains in places with wildly dissimilar circumstances.

I would not wish to discredit Taiwò for trying to piece together reasons for hope. But the dissymmetry between the accomplishments of the forces of reaction and of progressivism is such as to call deeply into question the belief that solidarity and collective action are the keys. In their study, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page quantified what most of us in our hearts already know: politicians are responsive to the wealthy and special interest groups, while “average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.” To suppose we have arrived at this circumstance because the activists and thinkers of the past just didn’t try hard enough is at once to discredit their achievements and to severely underrate the power of elites––not the minor elites who’ve attained to modest fame and fortune purveying wokeness, censuring white fragility, and selling racial sensitivity training workshops, but the politicians and magnates who actually shape policy.

Paradoxically, the belief that acting in coalition––slow, imperfect, often futile––remains the best political option requires not a retreat to reformism, but a raising of the stakes beyond all probability, and so, rather than examining a few areas that might be susceptible to change, Taiwò’s “world-making” project grows to encompass climate change, sovereign debt, and private ownership of housing. This kind of big-picture approach can be stirring, and perhaps some readers will take encouragement from the motivational titles scattered through Elite Capture (“Rebuild the House,” “The Point is to Change It,” “We’ve Got This”), but anyone who’s ever tried to get a remotely heterogeneous group to agree on pizza toppings will doubt how far consensus politics can take us. Magnifying the issue is that Taiwò’s book is itself the product of a professor at an elite university, and that its readership is unlikely to stretch far beyond the college-educated “political hobbyists” Eitan Hersh excoriates for mistaking news-watching and debate for political action.

Then again, the United States itself stands in an elite position vis-à-vis much of the rest of the world: it’s the biggest consumer, the second biggest polluter, the biggest military power, a record-setter in fomenting regime change. If the American voter’s sulky alternation between its two leading parties expresses anything, it’s less solidarity with those who suffer from its supremacy than a desire to maintain that supremacy at any cost. To address the country’s elites in the language of elites about the urgency of ending elite capture just doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that will work.

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