The Rickroll: How a 1987 Pop Single Became the Internet's Practical Joke

Somebody sends you a link. The link promises something you want. You click, and instead you get a young man in a long tan overcoat, dancing stiffly outside a brick wall while a bassline you have heard before starts up. You have been rickrolled, and the only appropriate response is to send the link to somebody else immediately.

Where It Came From

The mechanism predates the song. On 4chan in 2006 there was a running gag called the duckroll, in which a promised link delivered a picture of a duck on wheels. The format was already established. All it needed was better bait.

In 2007 somebody swapped the duck for the music video to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, and the joke went from mildly annoying to genuinely funny, because the song is good. That is the part people miss. A rickroll works because the payload is not punishment. It is four minutes of an extremely capable 1987 pop single that you will hum for the rest of the day against your will.

The Song Was Already a Hit

Worth remembering that Astley was not an obscure figure being resurrected. The single went to number one in the UK in 1987 and across a long list of other countries, and it was produced by Stock Aitken Waterman at the peak of their run. The voice surprised people then for the same reason it surprises people now, which is that it does not sound like it should be coming out of that face.

What Happened to Rick Astley

Here is the part that makes this one of the better meme stories. Astley had retired in the early nineties, largely by choice, and was living a quiet life when the internet decided to make him inescapable. His response was almost supernaturally relaxed. He found it funny, said so, and declined to be embarrassed.

Then he leaned in. He turned up in person at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 2008 and rickrolled a live television audience from the top of a float, which remains one of the great acts of public service in broadcasting. He has been touring successfully ever since, playing to real crowds, and covering songs by bands who were in nappies when the single charted.

The Money Question

Everybody asks whether he got rich from it. Astley has addressed this directly in interviews and the answer is that the streaming money from the video was real but modest, and considerably less than people assume. The value came back to him as a career rather than as a cheque. A retired pop star became a working musician again because a message board decided to annoy people with his back catalogue.

The Video Deletion Incident

In 2014 the original upload of the video came down over a terms of service issue, which briefly broke a substantial fraction of the internet’s existing links. A generation of dead rickrolls sat in old forum threads pointing at nothing. The official upload later became the canonical one and passed a billion views in 2021, which is a genuinely absurd number for a song from 1987.

Why It Refuses to Die

Most memes are jokes about a moment and die with the moment. The rickroll is a delivery mechanism, and mechanisms outlive content. It has been used by governments, by the Oregon state legislature, by protest movements in Hong Kong who worked out that a wall of Astley videos complicates automated censorship, and by every person who has ever wanted to disappoint a friend gently.

It also has the rarest property in internet comedy, which is that it does not hurt anybody. Nobody is the victim. The worst outcome is a good song and forty seconds of your time. In a genre built largely on strangers becoming punchlines without consent, the biggest joke on the internet is one where the man at the centre of it is having the best time of anybody.

Our advice, unchanged since 2015: click the link. It is probably the song, and the song is fine.