## What He Said About All of It
The clearest statement Astley has made about the sum of his career comes from the NPR interview with Michel Martin, syndicated in October 2016. He has said: “I’ve had a charmed, amazing life.”
This statement, considered against the full arc of what the life has contained — the childhood in Newton-le-Willows after the family broke apart, the tea-boy years in South London, the extraordinary commercial success of 1987 and 1988, the creative friction with SAW, the retirement at twenty-seven, the decade of ordinary life in Surrey, the meme, the Macy’s parade, the home-studio album, the number-one record at fifty — is either an extraordinary piece of understatement or a genuinely held assessment.
Given the consistency with which he has expressed it across multiple interviews and contexts, it seems to be the latter. He is not performing contentment. He appears to actually feel it.
He also has said something that is worth preserving as the summary note of his relationship to the rickrolling phenomenon specifically: that he thinks it “is funny, to be honest,” and that the cleverer versions — the edits of the Obama speech, the elaborate constructions that required real creative effort — represent genuine wit that he has genuinely appreciated. He is not wounded by being a joke. He is amused by the good ones.
The pop star from Newton-le-Willows who spent two years making tea at a South London studio, who had the best-selling single of 1987 in the UK, who retired at twenty-seven to take his daughter to school, who was turned into a global internet prank without his involvement, who made a number-one album in a home studio at fifty — this is the person. Not the meme. Not the video. Not the link you clicked because you thought it was something else.