## Foo Fighters, Westboro, and the Live Rickroll
Among the verified performance examples of rickrolling’s cultural reach, the Foo Fighters incidents stand out for the combination of deliberate deployment and rock-and-roll audacity.
In 2015, the Foo Fighters arrived at a scheduled concert to find Westboro Baptist Church protesters outside the venue. The Westboro Baptist Church’s practice of protesting at entertainment events and military funerals with anti-LGBTQ+ messaging had made them a target of various forms of public counter-protest. The Foo Fighters’ response on this occasion was to drive by the protesters in a flatbed truck while playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” and other songs, having clearly prepared a mobile counter-protest. The choice of “Never Gonna Give You Up” as one of the songs was a live rickroll — the deployment of the meme as a real-world tool, using the song’s specific cultural meaning to add a layer of absurdity to the counter-protest.
In 2017, at a concert in Tokyo, Astley joined the Foo Fighters on stage and performed “Never Gonna Give You Up” with them. This is a documented performance involving both parties in the same physical space, at the same time, and it represents one of the more concrete connections between the meme and its subject in the subsequent years.
The details of these incidents have been cited in various accounts with varying degrees of specificity, and this article has relied on the sources consulted to establish what is confirmed: the Westboro protests and the musical response are documented; the 2017 Tokyo performance with Astley is documented. Both represent the meme’s migration from online link to live performance.