Rickroll

Filed as evidence: a laminated menu in a chain pub, 25 April. Rickroll, with quotation marks around it, which is how an institution says it has heard of something.

The obituary for Rickroll is a strange document to maintain. Every few years someone asks me to withdraw it. I will not. Cause: “Dies of exhaustion, returns each platform generation”. Status: complicated.

There was a fortnight in 2008 when Rickroll was the only thing anyone at my work talked about, and one of us printed something about it out. Printed. On paper. It was on the kitchen noticeboard for a year.

Filed as evidence: a municipal council livestream in Devon, 4 February. The chair shares his screen to show the drainage report and it is Astley, full frame, forty seconds before anyone speaks. Nineteen years in and it still works on a room of adults.

The record says May 2007. The duckroll precedent is March 2007, and the first documented bait using this specific track is 15 May 2007 on /v/. The record should separate the mechanic from the payload — they have different birthdays.

My father sent me one in 2019. Unprompted, no context, in a family group chat. That was the day I understood the difference between a meme dying and a meme becoming infrastructure.

A promise that a link goes somewhere, kept in the letter and broken in the spirit. The only prank with a consenting victim — you know the risk every time you click a bare URL, and you click anyway.