## What His Daughter Told Him
The account that Astley has given of his daughter’s response to the rickrolling phenomenon is one of the most human moments in the whole story, and it is worth dwelling on.
When the meme began in 2007, Emilie Astley was approximately fifteen years old. She had grown up as the daughter of a former pop star who was not, in her lived experience, a pop star — he was her father, the person who drove her to school, who was there when she got home, whose career had been a story from before her conscious memory rather than a current reality. She was a teenager in 2007, precisely the age at which parents are understood to be embarrassing, and her father’s face was suddenly appearing on screens all over the internet whenever anyone clicked an unexpected link.
Her response, as Astley has described it in multiple interviews, was to tell him that the whole thing had nothing to do with him. Her delivery of this information was matter-of-fact and, by the implication of how he has retold it, somewhat dry. She was a fifteen-year-old teenager telling her father how internet culture worked. The underlying logic was accurate: the meme was about a video and a song and a phenomenon that had a life independent of the person whose name was attached to it. Rick Astley the person did not control the Rick Astley of the meme, and the meme’s spread and significance did not require anything from him except his continued existence.