The rickrolling meme began in 2007 — six years after his first return to recording. The narrative that the meme made him come back is not accurate. He had already come back. What the meme did was change the audience who knew his name, extend the reach of that name in ways that operated entirely outside the mechanisms of traditional music industry promotion, and ultimately create the conditions for the most significant chart success of his return years: the 2016 album *50*.
The participation in the “Here and Now” 80s tribute tour in Japan in 2007 — the tour that the *lost45.com* article identifies as part of his return to live performance — happened to coincide with the beginning of the meme’s spread. His family, Lene and Emilie, came along. This is a detail that recurs in accounts of his post-retirement life: the togetherness of the family as a unit, the way that music performance became compatible with family life rather than opposed to it, the shift from the promotional treadmill that had separated him from everything he valued to a mode of working that could include the people he was working for.
## May 2007: The Troll Who Changed Everything
The specific origin of the rickrolling meme can be dated with reasonable confidence to May 15, 2007. The platform was 4chan, the anonymous imageboard that had already established itself as one of the primary incubators of internet culture in the mid-2000s. The mechanism was a link disguised as something else — in this case, apparently a supposed trailer for *Grand Theft Auto IV* — that led instead to the music video for “Never Gonna Give You Up.”