The SAW formula that produced “Never Gonna Give You Up” was, in 1987, both celebrated and dismissed. Celebrated by audiences who bought the records in large quantities and by the industry that counted those sales as commercial relevance. Dismissed by critics for whom the formula’s efficiency was itself evidence of artistic emptiness — the argument being that music made by a calculated production machine to hit specific commercial targets was music that could not contain genuine artistic value.
This critical dismissal has aged badly, in the way that most sweeping aesthetic positions about pop music age badly when time provides enough distance to evaluate what actually lasted. The SAW records that endure — and several of them have endured in ways their critical reception would not have predicted — endure because they were good pop music. “Never Gonna Give You Up” was good pop music. The production was efficient because Stock and Aitken knew exactly what they were doing. The vocal was compelling because Astley had an instrument of genuine rarity. The song connected with listeners because it said something simple and true in a direct and musically effective way.
The critical vocabulary of the 1980s did not have adequate tools for evaluating what the SAW records actually were. It was a vocabulary developed primarily in response to rock music and its values — authenticity, raw expression, the primacy of the live performance, the creative autonomy of the performer as the measure of artistic worth. Pop music made in a studio by producers who wrote the songs for artists who sang them was, in this vocabulary, always already compromised, regardless of what it actually sounded like or communicated.