You might consider NPR the last place a tired internet prank would be played on air -- while discussing a serious candidate for state office, mind you. And, turns out, you'd be right.
But to a lot of NPR listeners on Twitter this morning it sure sounded like they were being Rickrolled during a Morning Edition segment with a feature on Sean Tevis, a first-time Kansas State House candidate trying to unseat Arlen Siegfried.
"I can't believe I got rick rolled by NPR. Gonna have that song in my head all day now," tweets stu42j.
"Had Rick Astley in my head all morning. I wonder if NPR realizes they Rick Rolled the enire listening audience with a story this morning," Twitter user bookeriv posts.
Not so, says NPR, defending its dignity.
“Since that little clip of the song came in the piece, it was a good music bug to segue into the next song,” said NPR’s Anna Christopher.
“As far [the producer] knows it wasn’t intended to be a joke.” She added that she hadn't even heard of Rickrolling until wired.com inquired about it after hearing the piece.
The unbearable lightness seemed appropriate because Tevis himself made reference to Rickrolling in an internet cartoon, “Running for Office: It's Like a Flamewar with a Forum Troll, but with an Eventual Winner” that he has used to raise thousands of dollars. The strip uses plenty of nerdy internet humor, including references to the musical internet prank most sane people are totally over.
"That's where you put a link somewhere and you say, 'Hey, go see this cool thing because it's really neat!' You click on the link, and instead of finding what you were expecting, suddenly you're redirected to a video of the singer Rick Astley singing, 'Never Gonna Give You Up,'" Tevis said on the program.
Twitter was a flutter with shock and awe at NPR’s presumed intentional ruse, making “NPR” one of the top “trending topics” this morning.
Surprised that listeners would think that staid-seeming Public Radio would stoop to such crass levels? Where have you been? They posted a Rickroll on an April Fool’s day blog post this year.
Rick Astley commented on the phenomenon earlier this year with mild enthusiasm.
“I think it’s just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it,” Astley said in an L.A. Times interview. “But that’s what's brilliant about the Internet.”
Brilliant a year ago, perhaps...but now that any hint of the tune alone raises thoughts of deception, have we gone too far?
