Rickrolling
Rickrolling is an Internet meme and prank involving the unexpected appearance of the 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up", performed by English singer Rick Astley, or its music video. The meme is a type of bait and switch, usually using a disguised hyperlink that leads to the music video instead of what was expected. The meme has also extended to using the song's lyrics in unexpected contexts or singing it during public events. After the origin of the meme in 2007 and the height of its popularity in 2008, rickrolling has become a very long-lived meme. Astley has seen his performance career revitalised by the meme's popularity.
The meme grew out of a similar bait-and-switch trick called "duckrolling" that was popular on the 4chan website in 2006. Rickrolling originated on 15 May 2007, when 4chan user Shawn Cotter uploaded the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video to YouTube and linked to it in place of the trailer for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV. It quickly became popular and spread to other Internet sites later that year.
The meme gained mainstream attention in 2008 through several events, beginning with a campaign by the hacker group Anonymous to protest the Church of Scientology through rickrolling. Awareness of rickrolling increased after two events in April 2008: YouTube used the meme for its April Fools' Day event, and users of several websites voted for "Never Gonna Give You Up" in a poll for the New York Mets' rally song. The meme inspired videos remixing "Never Gonna Give You Up", including "BarackRoll", which combined the song with footage of Barack Obama. Astley was initially hesitant about using the meme to further his career; he declined to appear at the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards, in which an online vote had named him "Best Act Ever". He accepted the publicity by rickrolling the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade—seen by millions of television viewers—with a surprise performance of the song on the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends's float.
Use of rickrolling peaked in 2008, but it remained popular. Later perpetrators of the prank included United States Representative Nancy Pelosi in 2009, members of the Oregon Legislative Assembly in 2010, and the Twitter account of the White House in 2011. Anonymous again used rickrolling as a tactic against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in 2015. The rock band Foo Fighters featured surprise appearances by Astley to rickroll audiences in 2017, having previously used the meme to protest the Westboro Baptist Church. The prank was also conducted by sports stadiums, including that of the San Diego Padres in 2019. Rickrolling resurged in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2021, the official YouTube video of "Never Gonna Give You Up"—one of several uploads used for rickrolling—had been viewed over one billion times.
History
Background
"Never Gonna Give You Up" is a song written by songwriting trio Stock Aitken Waterman and recorded by English singer Rick Astley. It appeared on his 1987 debut album Whenever You Need Somebody and was released as a single on 27 July of that year. It was a number one hit on several international charts, including the Billboard Hot 100 in the US, the ARIA Charts in Australia, and the UK Singles Chart, becoming the most popular single of the year in the UK. It is a dance-pop song with heavy use of synthesizers, catchy music, and repetitive lyrics sung in a baritone voice. It begins with a distinctive drum riff and a synthesizer melody, followed by the lines, "We're no strangers to love / You know the rules and so do I". The accompanying music video, Astley's first, was made in a single week, and Astley brought his own outfits. It features 21-year-old Astley performing the song while awkwardly dancing, wearing a trenchcoat and a coiffed hairstyle, alongside backup dancers wearing spandex and a bartender doing backflips.The song faded from popularity, being a common song on the radio for only about a year. It also received disapproval—with the television network VH1 listing it as one of the "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs"—and its 1980s style fell out of fashion. The song's reputation was influenced by its 1980s-style composition, its unpolished music video, and a perceived incongruity between Astley's youthful appearance and his low-pitched vocals. "Never Gonna Give You Up" was Astley's most successful song; it was one of two, alongside "Together Forever", to reach number one on the Billboard chart. Astley initially retired in 1994, at the age of 27, as he wanted more time with his family. He returned to touring in 2004 to mild success.
Internet memes originated in the 1990s, when they mostly involved humourous images. Video-based memes, such as viral videos, became popular in the 2000s as technology improved. Many memes originated on the imageboard website 4chan, which was also the origin of the hacker group Anonymous. On several websites, beginning in the late 1990s, users frequently posted bait-and-switch links that trolled readers by redirecting them to unexpected targets. These links often led to shock sites, which contained disturbing or graphic imagery. Trolling and bait-and-switch humour were popular on 4chan. Internet scholar Lee Knuttila wrote that bait-and-switch humour was a simple, fundamental element of the subculture of 4chan. According to Know Your Meme editor-in-chief Don Caldwell, rickrolling was the first bait-and-switch meme to gain mainstream popularity.
Pre-dating the first rickroll, in August 2005, the sitcom It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia featured "Never Gonna Give You Up". In the episode, "Charlie Has Cancer", the character Dennis sings along to the song in his car. Another precursor of rickrolling occurred in 2006, when rural Michigan resident Erik Helwig called in to a local radio sports talk show and, instead of conversing with the DJs, played "Never Gonna Give You Up". Caldwell said there was no confirmation of whether it had inspired the 4chan use of the song, and Helwig said he did not claim to be the "founder" of the meme. YouTuber Harrison Renshaw listed both Helwig and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia as contributors to the popularity of the rickroll.
Origin
The use of the song for rickrolling originated on 4chan. It was based on an earlier meme on the website known as "duckrolling", which originated in 2006. That year, the site's moderator, Christopher "moot" Poole, implemented a word filter replacing the word egg with duck as a gag. On one thread, where eggroll had become duckroll, an anonymous user posted an edited image of a duck with wheels, calling it a "duckroll". According to video game historian Kate Willært, this image had been created in April 2005 by Gaming-Age Forums user Christian "ferricide" Nutt, inspired by a fellow user of the forums known as Duckroll. It caught on across 4chan, becoming the target of a hyperlink with an otherwise interesting title, with a user clicking through having been stated to be "duckrolled".In March 2007, the first trailer for the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV was released onto the Rockstar Games website. Viewership was so high that it crashed Rockstar's site. Several users helped to post mirrors of the video on different sites, but one user on 4chan linked to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video on YouTube claiming to be the trailer, tricking numerous readers. Under the username cotter548, he uploaded the video, titled "Rickroll'D", on 15 May. The uploader was nineteen-year-old Shawn Cotter, a United States Air Force airman in South Korea; he publicly revealed his identity in an "ask me anything" post on Reddit in 2011, describing himself as "the one who inadvertently became the biggest troll on the internet". In a 2022 interview with Vice Media, he said the reason of using "Never Gonna Give You Up" was because he found an online list about songs that were popular in 1987, the year of his birth; he found the video funny and wanted it to be a meme. Cotter is generally considered the originator of the rickroll.
The practice of rickrolling became popular within a few days and replaced duckrolling with links pointing to Astley's video. The term began showing up in Google search data the same month. Rickrolling became popular on YouTube, with videos featuring people lip-syncing to the song or rickrolling public events, as well as mashup videos. Many videos used the phrase, "You've been RickRolled." Participants in the meme were too young to remember the original song. The trend contributed to sales of "Never Gonna Give You Up"—beginning in late December 2007, it received over 1,000 downloads per week, reaching a peak of 2,500 in the week of 9 March 2008. The song was also included in the series Family Guy in 2007.
Astley first became aware of rickrolling when he fell for the prank through a series of emails a US-based friend sent him during the early days of the phenomenon. Astley was on vacation and was confused until he called the friend, who explained the meme.
Growth in 2008
Rickroll against Scientology and early mainstream coverage
The first rickroll to gain mainstream attention, in February 2008, targeted the Church of Scientology, which had been aggressively trying to remove videos critical of the church. The group Anonymous, as part of their Project Chanology to challenge these actions, protested at the Church's various headquarters by chanting the song and playing it on boomboxes. Several YouTube videos documented these events, including one in which the rickroller falsely described Astley as "some dead guy". Members of Anonymous also created a website that mimicked the URL of a Scientologist website denouncing Anonymous, instead playing a rickroll.In March 2008, two employees of the athletics department of Eastern Washington University, Pawl Fisher and Davin Perry, rickrolled a number of games by the collegiate basketball team. These performances had Perry dressing up as Astley from the video and lip-syncing to the music as a prank before the start of the game. Fisher filmed and edited these into a YouTube video that made it appear as a single rickroll interrupting a game. After the video received millions of views, it was covered by local television station KHQ as well as The New York Times. Fisher pranked New York Times reporter Evelyn Nussenbaum by claiming the video was a single, unedited rickroll; the newspaper published a retraction after KHQ reported that this was false.
Popular blogs such as Gizmodo, Slashdot, and Boing Boing introduced the meme to larger audiences. Various Youtube uploads of the music video collectively reached 25 million views by April 2008, one of which, linked from the webpage yougotrickrolled.com, had 7 million views. Internet users also created lists of rickroll URLs, browser plugins that claimed to block rickrolls but actually caused them, and a Wikipedia article about the phenomenon. As potential victims of rickrolling began to suspect links, pranksters began to hide rickrolls within more complex videos, such as edited versions of scenes from popular media. The band Radiohead posted a rickroll claiming to be a download of their new album, In Rainbows, in March 2008.
Astley first publicly spoke about rickrolling in a March 2008 interview with The Los Angeles Times, titled "Never Gonna Give You Up, Rick Astley", in which he said:
Astley also said in the interview that he was not troubled by the phenomenon, stating that he found it "bizarre" and "weird", since he had not performed much lately, but he found the interest funny. The following month, a spokesperson for Astley's record label released a comment which showed that Astley's interest in the phenomenon had faded, stating, "I'm sorry, but he's done talking about Rickrolling". Despite this, the meme revived his career, and he continued to be asked about it years later. Astley overcame his initial annoyance about rickrolling after speaking with his daughter, who thought it was cool and told Astley that the joke was not about him.