Have you been rickrolled? Better yet, have you rickrolled someone? For the better part of the year, people have been sending the unsuspecting off to a video of Britpop musician Rick Astley's most famous song, "Never Gonna Give You Up." The trend reached epic ubermeme proportions yesterday when Astley was declared the winner of the "Best Act Ever" category at the European MTV music awards.

In case you missed it, "rickrolling" is a bait-and-switch where a person is given a link to click on and told that it is one thing, when it is actually the video for "Never Gonna Give You Up." Hilariety ensues the first few times, after which point you want to kill the person who rickrolled you. Or perhaps you will be infected and will begin to rickroll others. URL-hiding applications are often used in aid of this prank, such as tinyurl.com, so the clicker can't see what's coming.

So how did it happen that an '80s pop singer become an internet phenomenon that beat out established acts such as U2 and Britney Spears? As usual, the blame can be placed squarely on the shoulders of the internet hordes. The MTVE website encouraged people to vote as much as they liked, so clever people behind the effort to get Rick voted in created the Rickvoter, a voting script that would ensure Rick's victory. Web Scout at the L.A. Times accidentally voted using this script 961 times. 

The roots of this phenomenon are easy enough to follow. Rickrolling grew out of the message board and image site 4chan (not safe for work or those with delicate constitutions) and hit its height (or nadir, if you will) on April 1 of this year when Youtube made every link on its site a rickroll. In the spring of this year, rickrolling morphed into a disruptive public act as "Anonymous" took to the streets to protest Scientologists at their places of worship.  A ton of video can be found on the web of Anonymous dancing to a rickroll.

In the end, fans were disappointed to see that their hero, Astley, did not make it to the MTVE awards. There is some controversy about whether Rick was kept away on purpose or if he simply declined to show because he felt that he had not properly earned the award. Disappointingly, the dreadful Katy Perry announced the award, and it was accepted by the ubiquitous and bottom-feeding internet gossip maven Perez Hilton.

This ultimate MTV rickroll will go down in history as more evidence of what the internet does best--infecting people with virusy memes that can result in epic lulz. In this case, it produced one of the oddest comebacks in pop music. Rick will be in New York at the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade at the end of this month, and is touring around a bit now, which has got to be fun after fifteen-plus years in obscurity.

A sweet acoustic version. 

Rick Astley's official homepage 

The Pop-up Video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" is amusing.

The Barackroll!

SJ has had "Never Gonna Give You Up" as her ringtone for nine months, an all-time record.

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