February 6

There's quite a few cool birthdays to write about today, but my number one pick has to be Rick Astley. Yes, I know he looks like Conan O'Brien doing a Michael Buble impression, but the same time that I was digging Anthrax and Screaming Blue Messiahs, I was digging his "Whenever You Need Somebody" album. Astley's the king of blue-eyed soul, a style that faded with the 90's...
Until the Internet made him a phenom all over again, and allowed millions of people to disguise their fandom in a cloak of irony. Astley treated the whole 'rickrolling' phenomenon with class, even appearing in a Macy's Thanksgiving parade (and pushing it over the shark) for the whole thing.
It would be so easy to post "Never Gonna Give You Up" right now (and more appropriate to link to something completely different), but I'm speaking as an unapologetic fan. Here's one of my favorite recordings of his - or rather, a tv performance of his cover of "When I Fall in Love." I seem to like it better than the narrator, apparently...

By the way, his wife's a movie producer. In fact, one production, "Cashback", was an Oscar-nominated short that spun off into a pretty cool feature-length. Rick provided the score, too. Right on...