A day for the fools

The prank that changed a career.

I love stories where people think their time has passed, and then something happens and the dots all connect at once.

So I’ve always loved the story of Rick Astley, who was popular in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s but then retired from music in 1993 …. only to have one of his songs become an extremely famous internet prank many years later.

Rickrolling is when you send someone a disguised link that unexpectedly leads to the YouTube video of Astley’s 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. Rickrolling became popular on April Fool’s Day in 2007, a few years after Astley started working on making music again, and has remained an internet mainstay ever since.

Astley’s career was totally reinvigorated by the popularity of rickrolling - in July 2021, Never Gonna Give You Up became the fourth 1980s song to reach 1 billion views on YouTube - and it now has over 1.6 billion views.

Rickrolling is also the easiest prank ever to pull -

• Wow this article is wild - did you read it yet?

• Oh no this website seems like its down - can you see it?

• Should we get dad this thing for his birthday?

Just copy / paste one of these and you too will successfully rickroll someone today!

-Molly Beck