Rickrolling
The internet's favorite bait-and-switch: click a promising link, get Rick Astley's 1987 "Never Gonna Give You Up" instead. Born on 4chan in 2007 and peaking in 2008, it's the prank that never really gave up.
Rickrolling grew out of an earlier 4chan gag called 'duckrolling' — a word-filter joke that turned 'egg roll' into 'duck roll,' attached to a bait link. The music swap was born in the spring of 2007, when a 4chan user posted a link to the video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit 'Never Gonna Give You Up' disguised as the hotly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. The song itself was a genuine number-one hit in 1987, complete with Astley's earnest trenchcoat-dancing video.
The prank exploded in 2008. On April Fools' Day that year, YouTube rickrolled its own users by routing every featured video on its homepage to the clip, and in November 2008 Rick Astley appeared live at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade to lip-sync the song from a passing float — a moment widely called the peak of the phenomenon. Rickrolling became a rite of internet passage, spreading through forums, emails, and comment sections.
The gag never fully died: it resurfaces at conferences, in video games, and in viral clips, and the original video crossed a billion views on YouTube in 2021 — decades after the song, and years after the meme, first tricked people into pressing play.
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