In 1987, a 21-year-old Rick Astley released a debut single that hit number one in the US, the UK, and Australia, its booming baritone at odds with the boyish singer shuffling in a trench coat. The video was shot in a week, and he wore his own clothes. By 1994, worn down by the pop machine, he retired at 28 to raise his family. This episode tells what happened next: 14 quiet years, then a bait-and-switch prank that made him the most famous person online without his doing a thing.

The prank grew out of a 2006 message board joke called duckrolling. In May 2007, as fans hunted for the crashed Grand Theft Auto IV trailer, a 19-year-old US Air Force airman in South Korea posted Astley’s video under the trailer’s name. Astley was annoyed at first, until his daughter explained that the joke was on the person who clicked, not on him. He joined in, and the choice led to a number one album in 2016 and festival stages by 2023.

• The airman picked the song only because he was looking at hits from 1987, the year he was born.
• In late 2008 the internet flooded a European music award poll with roughly 100 million votes for Astley, and he later sprang the prank himself from a parade float on live television.
• Because he did not write the song, Astley had reportedly earned just $12 in performance royalties from the video platform by 2010.
• In 2015 hackers flooded the channels and hashtags of terror groups with the video, and a rock band brought Astley on stage in Tokyo to sing it over a grunge anthem.
• A 12-year-old pranked Astley with his own song in 2020, and the original video passed 1 billion views in 2021.