Czarina Grace Culture 02.11.2022 09:Feb AM EST

[VIRAL FLASHBACK] Rickrolling: How Rick Astley's Music Video Became a Legendary Meme

Many years after its official release, "Never Gonna Give You Up" and Rickrolling is still one of the biggest trends on the internet. Its unique fame earned it recognition as a "legendary meme."

The Rick Astley 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a popular topic for the internet culture. Up to date, the song features a lot of fans, and its Rickrolling meme is still a viral trend in the internet.

The Beauty of Rickrolling: A Viral Meme

For reference, "Rickrolling" is a brilliant and hilarious joke. Fans can Rickroll their victims by pretending to give "something" but redirecting them to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video instead.

For example, a friend will share a link to their social media account. But when a victim clicks it, good ol' Rick Astley suddenly fills up the screen and the drum beats take over the speakers. Congratulations, you've been Rickrolled.

Given its long history, Rickrolling has taken many different forms and pranks. Aside from internet hyperlinks, the man himself once Rickrolled the general public in a Thanksgiving Day Parade! YouTuber Logan Smith posted the memorable video of Macy's unique float presentation.

More recently, British comedian Adam Kay also Rickrolled thousands of Twitter users in an online thread. CBR reported the details of this viral development.

Kay started his joke with a "serious thread" about the "importance of data privacy." He said people should be very careful of what they post, especially with pictures. He tweeted a photo of the United Kingdom's Queen Elizabeth which contained so-called hidden clues.

Now, bearing in mind this is just what I can achieve as an amateur Adam with a laptop, it makes you wonder what other matters of state might have been shared over the years. Let's spin this round a bit and have a quick look at the top document. 2/6 pic.twitter.com/GDAszPvOqK
— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

Kay said zooming and enlarging the photos will reveal the fuzzy text on some confidential documents. He seemingly convinced many Twitter fans with his urgency.

We can probably lose the colour at this point as we're just looking at text. And given we've lost the bit under the red box in any case, I'm just going to concentrate on the words down the left hand side. Here. 4/6 pic.twitter.com/zq6mcYmL5C
— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

Finally, Kay tweeted "optical character recognition, it's called. So - without further ado - I've overlaid the best guess (99.3% accuracy per character) for the document in question."

...remarkably good at guessing what a word might be, even if the words are fuzzy round the edges. Optical character recognition, it's called. So - without further ado - I've overlaid the best guess (99.3% accuracy per character) for the document in question. 6/6 pic.twitter.com/VBkVQDhpsZ
— Adam Kay (@amateuradam) February 6, 2022

Fans obviously lost it when the final photo was revealed. At the time of writing, Kay scored 106,000 plus likes, 2,055 retweets, and 354 quote tweets.

'Never Gonna Give You Up' Hits 1 Billion Views

Note that the culture of Rickrolling helped the original video gain a lot of views. According to The Verge, the video hit daily views average of 2.3 million on April Fools Day!

Just last year, its original YouTube video finally reached more than 1 billion views! Rick Astley commented his gratitude to the fans and said the song was "amazing, crazy (and) wonderful."

It is worth mentioning that Astley initially disliked the legendary meme, per New York Post. However, the artist also seemed to have warmed up to the idea after it remained viral in these last few years. Fans hope it will continue to stay viral in the years to come.