This is part of why the rickrolling prank works as well as it does, beyond the purely comedic elements: the song that the prankee discovers when they click the link is not just any 1987 video but a video that contains a genuinely excellent vocal performance by someone who sounds like he is fully committed to what he is singing. The surprise of being rickrolled is followed, if the viewer stays for the whole song, by the experience of a pop song that is better than they expected. This is not the structure of every internet prank; it is specific to this one and part of what gives it a warmth that most internet pranks lack.
## Retirement as a Principled Decision
In the wider culture of celebrity and pop music, the act of walking away from fame at its height is rarely understood charitably. The default interpretive frame is one of failure: the star left because they were pushed, because the labels dropped them, because the drinking caught up with them, because some scandal intervened between the public person and continued commercial viability. The instinct is to locate a wound beneath the dignified exit.
Astley’s case resists this frame actively, which is perhaps one reason it requires the level of careful attention it has received in interviews and profiles over the years. He has been clear, repeatedly and consistently, that the 1993 decision was freely made. He had money. He had a healthy relationship. He had a new daughter. The industry had not turned on him; he had turned away from the industry, at a moment when he could afford to do so and had sufficient self-knowledge to understand why.