Never gonna give you up: The surprising resilience of the Rickroll, 10 years later
Against all odds, the Rickroll still hasn't turned around and deserted us.
The prank meme, ancient by internet standards, has had plenty of reasons to say goodbye, of course: the internet's short attention span, YouTube autoplay ads that ruin the surprise, and a live performance at the 2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, to name a few. But it hasn't. Armed with that sweet, sweet drum opening and a relentlessly catchy (let's be real) chorus, it remains the meme that keeps on meme-ing.
Rick Astley's 1987 chart-topper "Never Gonna Give You Up" is so ingrained in our collective consciousness that when Melania Trump uttered the words "He will never, ever give up," at the 2016 Republican National Convention, thousands of brains thought instantly of the Rickroll -- a meme that debuted nearly a decade ago.
So, what's the secret sauce? Why does a meme that essentially amounts to the unexpected appearance of a lip-synching man have so much staying power?
Well, the Rickroll is a little like a cockroach: it'll probably survive the apocalypse. Why? Because the Rickroll is universal: anyone can serve it up, and anyone can fall for it. It's so simple, so straightforward, that it can live anywhere.
That malleability also means the Rickroll can adapt when the internet starts to wise up. Has your go-to Rickroll vid been marred by a joke-spoiling ad? Upload a new one. Have your friends stopped opening your Bitly links? Splice Astley into another video -- a nice clip of a dog, for example, or someone doing some nice Parkour -- and watch your victims' faces fall.
Indeed, when we tried to find a Rickroll page that's impossible to close (a fun trick best suited for actual enemies), Google suggested a remarkably sinister list of searches:
One particularly memorable implementation happened in 2015, when the website Boing Boing published a post called "Rickrolling is sexist, racist, and often transphobic in context." This, of course, prompted legions of "Oh, shit" clicks, especially when the post was shared widely on Reddit.
You guessed it -- there was no article. It was just a Rickroll. Later that year, Anonymous made headlines for trying to Rickroll ISIS. At that point, the meme was more than eight years old.
This isn't to say that Rickrolling is ubiquitous. In 2017, it's hardly even common. But what's remarkable is the internet's short attention span has actually worked in its favor. Think about it: if you get Rickrolled, you'll certainly be on guard for a few hours. But if you haven't thought about Rick Astley in a few months, you're susceptible, as we personally learned when a friend recently embedded the song in a movie trailer. (Revenge is coming.)
Honestly, if there's one thing that the Rickroll proves, it's that we're all equal-opportunity suckers. So go forth and Rickroll, we guess. It's not like it's deserting us anytime soon.
And for more internet prank ideas, check out this link.
Topics YouTube
Chloe was the shopping editor at Mashable. She was also previously a culture reporter. You can follow her on Twitter at @chloebryan.
