Rickrolling is a prank that became a craze and has almost become a cliché. In fact it has. The prank is a simple bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to some topic or other, but the link actually takes the user to the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The URL will be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user doesn’t suspect that a rick-roll is in progress.
So if you receive an email from a friend entitled “That rumor about Microsoft is True” and it includes a link then it could easily be a Rick-Roll. Even porn spam could be a Rick Roll nowadays. Rick Rolls also lurk on web sites. As a web site developer it is now almost obligatory to inject a Rick Roll somewhere – in the FAQs perhaps.
According to authorities on the matter, it started out as “duckrolling” a feature of the imageboard 4chan, when some links that appeared interesting actually linked to a duck with wheels. Legend has it that some wag eventually substituted Rick Astey for the duck and Rick-Rolling was born.
The Rick-Rolling Explosion
By early this year, Rick-Rolling had become an Internet phenomenon. A poll by SurveyUSA in April estimated that at least 18 million American adults have been Rick-Rolled, but at the time of writing YouTube indicates that the number is more likely to be in the region of 40 million. There are multiple Rick Roll videos on YouTube including a version that runs in reverse that has been viewed by half a million people – presumably if you’re caught by that one you’ve been Llor-Kcired.
The Rick Rolling song “Never Gonna Give You Up” has been used as a theme song by Scientology opponents – although I’m not exactly sure why. (Are Scientologists more irritated by pranks than other people?) The New York Times reported that a women’s basketball game was interrupted by a Rick Roll consisting of a Rick Astley impersonator singing the dreaded song. In April, “Never Gonna Give You Up” won a contest to become a Mets 8th innings baseball song, which means that the Mets became the first baseball team to be Rick Rolled (rumor has it that Rick Rolling fanatics rigged the vote.)
This may have had something to do with the fact that on April 1st, Rick-Rolling took off exponentially, as hundreds of web sites got the idea to insert a Rick Roll where you thought you were going to look at an interesting piece of news or a video of something else.
The first known TV Rick Rolling took place in June on the late night talk show, Last Call with Carson Daly. Carson announced that he was going to show “a video of Paris Hilton” he’d discovered but instead he rick-rolled over a million people in a single hit. Other TV Rick Rollings followed with The Daily Show’s Rick Rolling possibly the biggest TV audience yet carried out by John Oliver who was claiming to be about to reveal somthing to do with the Iranian nuclear threat. Oliver proclaimed; “You just got rickrolled, Jon. All your coworkers will think you’re a big, gay Rick Astley fan.”
Rick Rolling entered the US election with a number of political bloggers posting articles and comments claiming to link to footage of Michelle Obama going on a rant that include racist references to ‘Whitey’. It was a Rick Roll.
For a brief time there was a Rick Rolling phone service that you could ring and direct to a victim that you wanted to Rick Roll by phone. The service has been taken down.
As regards Rick Astley himself, he must find it extraordinary that a video he made 20 years ago has now been watched by a population greater than that of most countries and may even be the most listened to song of 2008 – and the most inadvertently listened to song ever.
