Rick Astley has released eight studio albums, the most recent of which actually managed to crack the Top 10 best-sellers chart in the United Kingdom when Beautiful Life was released in the summer of 2018, and the one before that debuted at number one, but for most people, the singer is always going to be known for ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ and nothing else.
The song was a massive hit when it was released in 1987, rocketing Astley to international superstardom after it topped the charts in 25 countries around the world and sold millions of copies. The singer may have failed to recapture those heights in the three decades since, but he’s now firmly established as a pop culture mainstay thanks to the Rickrolling phenomenon.
The meme first gained notoriety among the online community in 2008, and ever since then it’s appeared with frequent regularity, and every internet user appears to have fallen victim to it at least once.
YouTuber Domy13 has now gone to great lengths to painstakingly recreate the ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ music video entirely out of LEGO, and this is one instance of Rickrolling that people have actively been looking for, given that it’s racked up over two million views since first appearing five months ago.
Astley wasn’t initially a huge fan of the Rickrolling fad, especially when he’d just returned to performing after spending ten years on hiatus and felt he might end up as the butt of a joke, but he eventually embraced the craze and it’s led to a massive resurgence in his popularity.
The pop star might have faded into obscurity completely if it wasn’t for the enduring success and new lease of life enjoyed by ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ over the last dozen years, and he might end up checking out the LEGO version for himself having admitted in the past that he’s been Rickrolled on more than one occasion.