Simon West, who directed the music video, subsequently went on to a significant career as a film director — *Con Air* in 1997, *Lara Croft: Tomb Raider* in 2001, *The Expendables 2* in 2012. His direction of the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video in 1987 was early work from someone who clearly knew how to create a visual product that served a commercial purpose. The video’s three locations — a bar, a coat-check area, a parking structure — were unremarkable in themselves but served the specific requirements of the concept: Astley needed to be in motion, in multiple contexts, demonstrating the energy and presence that the record communicated in audio terms. The styling choices — the double-breasted suit, the trench coat, the specific cut and color of the clothes — were absolutely of their moment in a way that Astley himself has acknowledged, with the rueful clarity of someone who has watched the footage with three decades of subsequent fashion history in view.
## The First Dimension of the Meme: Surprise
The specific emotional structure of the rickrolling prank is worth analyzing with some care, because it is not simply a matter of one content being replaced by another. It operates on a specific psychological mechanism that exploits the gap between expectation and experience.
The person who clicks a rickroll link is in a state of anticipatory engagement. They have been given, by the text of the link or the surrounding context, a reason to expect something specific: a game trailer, a news story, a funny image, a music clip — something that fits the conversation or context in which the link appeared. The expectation creates a specific cognitive posture: a leaning toward, a readiness to receive a particular kind of content.