The Rickroll

MAR 15 2007 · 12:00

Rick Astley's pointing-finger dance from Never Gonna Give You Up, 1987. The bait-and-switch link began on 4chan's /v/ board in March 2007; the loop became a forum-web reaction GIF independent of the prank that surfaced it. Place: 4chan /v/ board · a fake Grand Theft Auto IV preview link Figures: Anonymous /v/ users · Rick Astley, unwitting subject · Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, Pete Waterman, who wrote the 1987 song On 15 March 2007 a poster on 4chan's /v/ board (see [[4chan-founded-2003]]) shares a link claiming to lead to the first-ever gameplay trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV. The link instead redirects to Rick Astley's 1987 music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. The first documented Rickroll. By April the prank has spread to /b/, then to SomethingAwful (see [[somethingawful-image-macros-2002]]), then to the wider forum web. The mechanism is older than the joke. Bait-and-switch links are as old as hyperlinks. What makes the Rickroll persistent is the choice of payload: a song familiar enough to be instantly recognized, square enough to be inherently funny in an ironic frame, and (crucially) the music video's specific aesthetic of mid-twenties Astley in a beige trenchcoat doing the cha-cha with a pointed finger. The finger becomes the GIF.