He said it himself: “I’ve had a charmed, amazing life.”
The link is just a link. The life is the point.
## Forty Years On
In October 1986, when the recording session for “Never Gonna Give You Up” was taking place at PWL Studios in Borough, Rick Astley was twenty years old. He had been in London for roughly two years by that point, moving through the apprenticeship that Pete Waterman had structured for him, absorbing the craft and the culture of a specific kind of record-making that was at its commercial height. The recording session produced a track. The track became a single. The single changed the scale of his life entirely and in a matter of months.
Forty years later, the song is still playing. It plays on licensed streaming platforms where the royalty rates are better than they were in 2010. It plays in television shows and films when a director needs a piece of music that communicates a specific 1980s emotional register. It plays when Astley performs it live, in concerts where audiences know the words to every line and sing them back with the enthusiastic recognition that only songs of genuine cultural weight produce. And it plays when someone, somewhere in the world, sends a link to a friend with the promise of something interesting — and the friend clicks it, and the video begins, and the recognition happens, and the joke lands again.
The joke has not gotten old. This is itself remarkable: internet humor typically has a half-life measured in weeks or months, and the jokes that survive beyond those periods do so either because they are constantly being renewed by new contexts and new variations, or because they contain something that is genuinely, durably funny. Rickrolling has both of these qualities. It is renewed constantly by new deployments and new contexts — the politician who posts it accidentally, the television show that uses it as a plot point, the corporate social media account that attempts it with varying degrees of self-awareness. And it contains something genuinely funny at its core: the gap between what you were promised and what you got, resolved not in disappointment but in the pleasant recognition of a familiar face.