18-second video clip from Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up”
25 September 2020
A rickroll is a particular type of bait-and-switch prank played on the internet. In a rickroll, a person posts a link that is either clickbait or ostensibly related to the discussion at hand but that actually links to a video of Rick Astley’s 1987 song “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Rickroll is obviously a compound of Rick (as in Astley) + roll. The origin of the rick half is clear enough, but the roll needs some explaining.
The first known instance of a rickroll, albeit an audio-only one, was on 31 August 2006, when Erik Helwig dialed into a radio call-in show and instead of talking played Astley’s song.
The first documented video rickroll was on 15 May 2007. A trailer for the video game Grand Theft Auto IV had just been released and demand was so high the original site crashed. Various mirror sites popped up, and one person on the site 4chan posted a link purporting to be to the game’s trailer but was actually to Astley’s video. This was followed by a myriad of rickrolls on 1 April 2008, April Fool’s Day, widening and cementing the prank’s reach and popularity. The claim that rickrolling originated on 4chan is plausible, but due to that site’s well-deserved demise, it cannot be verified.
Image of duck with wheels instead of legs and the caption “duckroll”
The term rickroll, as opposed to the prank itself, without any doubt got its start on 4chan. In 2006, 4chan founder m00t played a bait-and-switch prank in which the word egg in posts to that site was changed to duck. Thus, the word eggroll became duckroll. And soon 4chan users began posting a picture of a duck with wheels to the site. So, when the Astley bait-and-switch prank started, it was quickly labeled rickroll.
Again, the early 4chan uses of the word rickroll have been lost to the ages, but term begins appearing as a search term in Google in early May 2007, which aligns with the origin on 4chan. The earliest published use of rickroll I have found is from a music review in the Village Voice on 29 August 2007:
Yet his pencil-neck frame and caramel baby-face (reminiscent of Emmanuel Lewis) make him less the progeny of Barry White than that of a similarly gawky deep throat: Rick Astley. One video (set to music from the Nintendo game Mega Man II) explains how “ZONDAY CREATED THE CHOCOLATE RAIN TO STOP THE FAGGOTRY OF RICKROLL”; not to be outdone, Zonday soon posted an octave-lower cover of Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
Two weeks later, an article in the Guelph Mercury (Ontario) on 13 September 2007 gave an account of the prank that just about sums it all up:
Spend enough time online and you're bound to experience the Web 2.0 equivalent of getting punk'd.
Referred to as Rick Rolling or getting Rick Rolled, you click a juicy link—say, a secret clip of a movie or video game -- only to end up at YouTube with Rick Astley shimmying to his late '80s hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.
The Web prank has definitely made its presence known online—not to mention in my head where it's still stuck.
Sources:
Beta, Andy. “Music: The Chocolate Wars.” The Village Voice, 29 August 2007, 76. ProQuest Music & Performing Arts Collection.
“The Biggest Little Internet Hoax on Wheels Hits Mainstream.” Foxnews.com, 22 April 2008. Internet Archive: Way Back Machine.
Dubs, Jamie. “Rickroll.” Knowyourmeme.com. 2020. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/rickroll
Helwig, Erik. “Early Rickroll Proof (08.31.2006).” Archive.org, 29 June 2020.
“You Just Got Rick Rolled.” Guelph Mercury (Guelph, Ontario), 13 September 2007, F14. ProQuest.
Video credit: Rick Astley, 1987.
Image credit: Knowyourmeme.com.