The description of the album’s success as “pretty freaky” — a phrase he used in interviews — captures the combination of pleasure and disbelief that the chart position produced. He had made the album without commercial expectations, in his own studio, as a personal creative project tied to a specific life milestone. The market responded by making it a number one record.
Whether the rickrolling meme contributed to the audience for *50* is a question worth examining carefully. There is certainly a plausible causal story: the meme kept his name in circulation for nearly a decade, introduced him to a younger audience that had no memory of his 1980s career, and created a general cultural awareness of Rick Astley that pre-dated the album’s release. The audience that bought *50* presumably included people who had encountered his name primarily through the meme rather than through any direct memory of 1987.
But it would be an oversimplification to say the meme caused the album’s success. The album succeeded because it was good — because Astley had spent the years since 1993 developing as a musician and a producer, because the solo creation model had produced something personal and distinct, and because the audience for it, however it was assembled, responded to what the music actually was. The meme made his name visible. The album gave the name something to be attached to.
## Creative Control and What It Meant to Him
One of the persistent themes in Astley’s accounts of his career — from the early SAW years through the retirement and the return — is the question of creative control. It is not an abstract concern for him. It defines the arc of his professional life in specific and concrete ways.