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Rickrolling
Internet prank and meme From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Rickroll is an Internet meme involving the unexpected appearance of the music video to the 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up", performed by English singer Rick Astley. The aforementioned video has over 1.6 billion views on YouTube. The meme is a type of bait and switch, usually using a disguised hyperlink that leads to the music video. When someone clicks on a seemingly unrelated link, the site with the music video loads instead of what was expected, and they have been "Rickrolled". The meme has also extended to using the song's lyrics, or singing it, in unexpected contexts.
The meme grew out of a similar bait-and-switch trick called "duck rolling" that was popular on the 4chan website in 2006. The video bait-and-switch trick grew popular on 4chan by 2007 during April Fools' Day and spread to other Internet sites later that year. The meme gained mainstream attention in 2008 through several publicized events, particularly when YouTube used it on its 2008 April Fools' Day event.[1]
Astley, who at the time had only recently returned to performing after a 10-year hiatus, was initially hesitant about using his newfound celebrity from the meme to further his career but accepted the publicity by Rickrolling the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with a surprise performance of the song. Since then, Astley has seen his performance career revitalized by the meme's popularity. Astley himself has also been Rickrolled.
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Background
"Never Gonna Give You Up" is a pop song written by Stock Aitken Waterman and recorded by Rick Astley.[2] It appeared on his 1987 debut album Whenever You Need Somebody[3] and was released as his solo debut single[citation needed] on 27 July of that year.[2] It was a number one hit on several international charts,[2] including the Billboard Hot 100,[4] Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks,[citation needed] and the UK Singles Chart.[2] The accompanying music video, Astley's first, features him performing the song while awkwardly dancing, wearing a trenchcoat and a coiffed hairstyle,[2][4][5] alongside backup dancers wearing spandex.[6] The song faded from popularity, being a common song on the radio for only about a year.[7] It also received disapproval—with the television network VH1 listing it as one of the "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs"—and became known as outdated. Its reputation was influenced by its 1980s-style use of synthesizers, its unpolished music video, and a perceived disconnect between Astley's appearance and his low-pitched vocals.[2] "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.[8] Astley initially retired in 1994, at the age of 27.[2][3]
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", Dennis sings along to the song in his car.[9] 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". Know Your Meme editor-in-chief Don Caldwell said there was no confirmation of whether it had inspired the 4chan use of the song, and Caldwell said he did not claim to be the "founder" of the meme.[2]
Origin
The use of the song for rickrolling originated on the imageboard website 4chan, on which many memes originated[10] bait-and-switch humour was popular.[2] 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". The image 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".[2][11]
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 had linked to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video on YouTube claiming to be the trailer, tricking numerous readers.[11] The user later identified himself as United States Air Force airman Shawn Cotter. 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.[5] This practice quickly replaced duck rolling for other alluring links, all generally pointing to Astley's video, and thus creating the practice of rickrolling.[11] Cotter, under the username cotter548, uploaded the original rickroll video to YouTube with the title, "Rickroll'D".[12]
Rickrolling became popular on YouTube, with videos featuring people lip-syncing to the song or rickrolling public events. Many of these used the phrase, "You've been RickRolled." 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.[4] Various Youtube uploads of the music video collectively reached 25 million views by April 2008,[11] one of which, linked from the webpage yougotrickrolled.com, had 7 million views.[7] 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.[10]
Growth in 2008
The first rickroll to gain mainstream attention[2][10] involved the Church of Scientology, which had been aggressively trying to censor videos critical of the church. The Internet group Anonymous, as part of their Project Chanology to challenge this censoring, protested at the Church's various headquarters by chanting the song and playing it on boomboxes. Members of Anonymous also created a website that mimicked the URL of a Scientologist website denouncing Anonymous, instead playing a rickroll.[10]
In March 2008, two employees of Eastern Washington University, Pawl Fisher and Davin Perry, rickrolled a number of games by the collegiate basketball team.[2] 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.[7] 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 the New York Times reporter by claiming it was a single, unedited rickroll, leading to a retraction being published.[2]
Astley has stated that he first became aware of rickrolling when he fell for the prank through an email his friend sent him during the early days of the phenomenon.[5][13] 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:[14]
I think it’s just one of those odd things where something gets picked up and people run with it. But that is what’s brilliant about the Internet.[2][15]
...
If this had happened around some kind of rock song, with a lyric that really meant something—a Bruce Springsteen [song], "God Bless America", or an anti-something kind of song, I could kind of understand that. But for something as—and I don’t mean to belittle it, because I still think it’s a great pop song—but it’s a pop song, do you know what I mean? It doesn’t have any kind of weight behind it, as such. But maybe that’s the irony of it.[2][16]
— Rick Astley, The Los Angeles Times, "Never Gonna Give You Up, Rick Astley"
Astley also said in the interview that he was not troubled by the phenomenon, stating that he found it "bizarre"[11] and "weird", since he had not performed much lately, but he found the interest funny.[17][14] At the time, a spokesperson for Astley's record label released a comment which showed that Astley's interest in the phenomenon had faded, as they stated, "I'm sorry, but he's done talking about Rickrolling".[11][18] Despite this, the meme revived his career, and he continued to be asked about it years later.[2] As he recounted in a 2016 Associated Press interview, Astley overcame his initial annoyance about rickrolling after his daughter thought it was cool.[19][8]
In a 2008 April Fools' joke, YouTube made all links to videos on the site's home page end up on the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video.[20][6] The coordinators of the prank had contacted Astley's record label, Sony BMG,[a] which had made its music available on the website two years earlier; according to label executive Sam Gomez, Astley had liked the idea.[2] YouTube was one of several websites to independently pull such a prank,[11] along with Sports Illustrated and LiveJournal. On that day, the YouTube video received 6.6 million views and 43,000 comments, while the song became the 77th most popular listing on Amazon Music.[4] Moot told Fox News that he was "very surprised" at the prank's use by mainstream websites, adding that he had initially disliked rolling before "it got really catchy", and that he expected the meme to fade soon.[11] April Fools' Day strongly contributed to the meme's popularity;[6] Google Trends showed that the highest volume of searches about rickrolling occurred that month.[2]
The following week,[11] the New York Mets baseball team asked fans on the Internet what song they should use for their eighth-inning rally song. "Never Gonna Give You Up" received five million votes, driven by websites like YouTube, Fark, and Digg.[11][16][6] In response, the team replaced the online vote with an audience vote of the six most-voted songs during the first game of the season;[16] the audience booed in response to "Never Gonna Give You Up".[11] Rickrolling gained further mainstream awareness after this event, with a SurveyUSA poll the same month estimating that at least 18 million US adults had been Rickrolled, based on a sample of 959.[22][2] By this time, "Never Gonna Give You Up" became one of the biggest viral videos[6] or memes.[16]
A flash mob performed a rickroll at Liverpool Street Station, London, in April 2008.[23] Another flash mob performed a rickroll in Baltimore the following month, being organised by Facebook user Ryan Goff, and was covered in the internationally syndicated Baltimore Sun. An August 2008 YouTube video by Hugh Atkin, titled "Barackroll", footage of Barack Obama dancing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show was paired with "Never Gonna Give You Up"; the video was acknowledged by The Ellen DeGeneres Show and by Astley. Atkin also made a sequel titled, "John McCain Gets BarackRoll'd".[2]
At the 2008 MTV Europe Music Awards in November 2008, Astley was nominated for "Best Act Ever" at the MTV Europe Music Awards after the online nomination form was flooded with votes.[24] Despite not being on the original shortlist of nominees, Astley was named the Best Act Ever with one hundred million votes votes—more than all other votes combined—effectively rickrolling the awards.[25][2] On 10 October, Astley's website confirmed that an invitation to the awards had been received. On 6 November 2008, just hours before the ceremony were due to air, it was reported that MTV Europe did not want to give Astley the award at the ceremony, wanting instead to present it at a later date. Many fans who voted for Astley felt the awards ceremony failed to acknowledge him as a legitimate artist.[26] Astley chose not to attend the ceremony,[27] instead making a statement saying, "This is the first time I have been nominated for the EMAs and I would like to thank everyone who voted for me".[25][2] Astley stated in an interview that he felt the award was "daft", but noted that "MTV were thoroughly rickrolled".[26]
By November 2008, the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video on YouTube had more than 20 million views;[27] however, Astley initially appeared indifferent to the newfound fame.[2] However, at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Astley made a surprise appearance on a float of the animated TV show Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends for Cartoon Network to lip-sync the song to the crowd and television audiences, making that performance the largest rickroll to date.[27] Astley had been wary of trying to promote himself using the popularity of the meme, but he agreed to make this appearance because Cartoon Network offered him a considerable payment for his performance and because his friends in America urged him to agree.[3] The Daily Telegraph wrote that this appearance was "the pinnacle of Rickrolling" and "may have been the most widely-seen Rickroll ever".[27][2] It went viral on social media within minutes.[27]
Continued popularity
Rickrolling continued to be popular after its peak in 2008, lasting much longer than other memes.[2] In 2009, Astley wrote about 4chan founder moot for Time magazine's annual Time 100 issue, thanking moot for the rickrolling phenomenon.[28] Although "Never Gonna Give You Up" had received hundreds of millions of views on YouTube as a result of the meme, one of the song's composers, Pete Waterman, said in April 2009 that he had received only £11 (16).[29][21] According to The Register, as of 2010[update], Astley had directly received only $12 in performance royalties from YouTube; Astley did not compose the song and received only a performer's share of the sound recording copyright.[30]
Sorry to hear that. Fiscal policy is important, but can be dry sometimes. here's something more fun: https://tinyurl.com/y8ufsnp #WHChat
27 July 2011[31]
This WH correspondence briefing isn't nearly as entertaining as yesterday's. #TCOT #WHchat
27 July 2011[32]
University of Oregon-based a cappella group On The Rocks posted a video of themselves singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on the New York City Subway in March 2010; the video went viral and brought fame to the group.[2] The same month, members of the Oregon state legislature, spearheaded by Jefferson Smith, slipped snippets of the song's lyrics into speeches they gave on the floor of the legislature in 2011.[2] They stitched together a video compilation of these snippets into the full song, posted on April Fools' Day.[33][34] On 27 July 2011, the Twitter account of the White House, being operated by Brian Deese, posted a rickroll link during a chat session, in response to a user who had criticized the tone of the session's posts.[2]
Apple rickrolled consumers in 2015 by showing them the song's lyrics when they viewed the Apple Watch help page.[2] In 2016, a developer from Melbourne, Paul Fenwick, started several Rick Astley hotlines that when called, would play "Never Gonna Give You Up", which were used thousands of times per month in 2018.[35] The rock band Foo Fighters brought Astley on stage to rickroll the audience of a 2017 concert.[2] Also in 2017, the television network Adult Swim released a video that claimed to be a preview of the third season of Rick and Morty, but was instead a compilation of scenes from the show with "Never Gonna Give You Up" playing.[18]
On 25 August 2019, the Boston Red Sox and the San Diego Padres played a Major League Baseball game at the Padres' stadium, Petco Park. During a mid-inning break, the Padres' scoreboard began to play "Sweet Caroline"—a tradition at Red Sox home games—but as the song approached the chorus, the videoboard suddenly switched to "Never Gonna Give You Up".[36] In April 2018, the creators of TV's Westworld released a video that purported to be a spoiler guide for the entire second season in advance, but instead featured lead actress Evan Rachel Wood singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".[37] The website Polygon wrote, "Westworld has finally killed the Rickroll".[2][18] In the post-credits scene of Walt Disney Animation Studios' 2018 sequel film Ralph Breaks the Internet, a fake sneak peek of Frozen II suddenly switches to Ralph singing "Never Gonna Give You Up" and replicating Astley's dance from the original music video.[38]
On 13 October 2019, during the Sunday night NFL game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Los Angeles Chargers at Dignity Health Sports Park, the announcers played the beginning of the Styx song "Renegade", a standard at the Steelers' home of Heinz Field, then switched to "Never Gonna Give You Up".[39][40]
Rickrolling saw a massive resurgence online in the early 2020s.[citation needed] During the COVID-19 pandemic, creative technologist Matt Reed created an application called InviteRick, which made the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video briefly appear in a Zoom meeting.[41][42]
Replying a Reddit post by Astley in June 2020, a user, u/theMalleableDuck, claimed to have met Astley backstage when they were 12 years old, but instead posted a link to the song. Astley replied with a clapping emoji, implying that he had been tricked into clicking the link.[43][44] The thread became the most upvoted post of 2020 on Reddit.[44]
A 4K remaster of the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video was uploaded in early 2021; some commenters on Twitter criticized it as being poorly edited.[45] The Pokémon Company announced 1 July 2021 as "Bidoof Day"—celebrating a Pokémon character associated with memes—which turned out to be a rickroll using a parody of "Never Gonna Give You Up".[46] Later that month, the music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" reached 1 billion views, becoming the fourth 1980s song to do so; this had included two million views on the preceding April Fools' Day.[15] Astley responded in a Twitter video, That is mind-blowing. The world is a wonderful and beautiful place, and I am very lucky."[8] He also celebrated the event by selling signed copies of the song on vinyl.[15]
In the tenth episode of the second season of Ted Lasso, "No Weddings and a Funeral", the character Deborah prepares to give a eulogy but instead leads the attendees in singing "Never Gonna Give You Up", rickrolling them.[47] Activist Greta Thunberg rickrolled her Twitter followers on April Fools' Day 2021 by claiming to post a climate-related video that instead linked to Astley's music video.[48] She followed this on 16 October 2021 with a climate-action speech at the Climate Live concert in Stockholm in which she said, "We're no strangers to love", before being joined by another activist and singing the song and dancing to it; Astley tweeted his thanks.[49]
Astley recreated the original video clip in a 2022 advertisement for the American Automobile Association. Advertisements for the agency included QR codes to this clip to rickroll the viewers.[50]
Under the second Trump administration, on the release of the files related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein in February 2025, the House Judiciary Committee used a rickroll link in place of an actual link to the files while posting about them on social media.[51]
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Method
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Rickrolling is a bait-and-switch joke in which the viewer clicks a link, expecting it to be relevant, but is instead brought to "Never Gonna Give You Up".[2] The term has been extended to the act of playing the song to interrupt a situation, as was the case with the Scientology rickrolling,[7] as well as the hidden use of the song's lyrics.[citation needed]
The "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video was unofficially uploaded to YouTube when the meme began. In February 2010, the original upload was removed for terms-of-use violations, but the takedown was revoked within a day.[21][23] It was taken down again on 18 July 2014 and later unblocked.[12] The official Rick Astley channel uploaded another version on 24 October 2009,[52] its URL ending with the identifier "dQw4w9WgXcQ". Computer scientists Benoit Baudry and Martin Monperrus called this "the canonical rickroll URL", being the most watched result for the YouTube search string "Rick Astley never gonna give you up".[53]: 190 In 2022, Baudry and Monperrus documented cases of Rickrolling in academic literature by searching Google Scholar for "dQw4w9WgXcQ", finding 23 instances in which an author appeared to include the "dQw4w9WgXcQ" URL with the intent to rickroll, such as by placing it in footnotes.[53]: 189–195
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Analysis
Writing for MEL magazine, Brian VanHooker attributed the use of the song to its "randomness" and its reputation as a hit from the 1980s.[2]
Blogger David Griner of Adfreak.com said in 2008 that rickrolling was the "perfect example of a viral video because the definition of one is something that gets out and is uncontrollable".[6] Caldwell of Know Your Meme said in 2020, "It seems like the volume of memes these days means that none of them have any longevity, but for Rickrolling, it’s such an old meme that it’s like an ‘old-school’ Internet reference. It’s nostalgic."[2]
See also
- List of Internet phenomena
- List of practical joke topics
- Sandstorm (instrumental), an instrumental piece by Finnish DJ Darude that has become the subject of a similar Internet meme.
- goatse.cx, the shock bait-and-switch precursor to Rickrolling.[54]
Notes
- "Never Gonna Give You Up" had been published by RCA Records, which later merged with Sony.[21]
References
Further reading
External links
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