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The duration of the audio is only 17 seconds and it resembles the sound of 80s-era Genesis being played underwater in a swimming pool. Despite its bouncy yet deteriorated quality, this snippet of popular music has become a major and long-standing enigma on the internet.
In 2021, Carl92 uploaded a clip and asked for help identifying it on WatZatSong. He found it amongst old files in a DVD backup and stated that it sounded vaguely familiar. Despite posting the 17-second sample on Reddit, known for its vast knowledge of pop culture, no one was able to identify the song or artist.
The quest has caught the public imagination. Last June it gained its own subreddit – named after the song’s unofficial title, Everyone Knows That (Ulterior Motives), or EKT – which now has about 27,000 members. And lately TikTok has caught on, with predictable results: users have piled in with unhelpful comments such as: “Have you tried Shazaming it?”, which is the equivalent of telling someone who has lost their keys to check their pockets.
Bas, a moderator on the subreddit and a music journalist from the Netherlands, thinks that the popularity of the quest is due in part to shifts in culture. He explains, “We are in a time where information is easily accessible and we can listen to music without many limitations. This makes music from the pre-internet era particularly intriguing to younger generations, as it is a completely unfamiliar experience to not be able to search for a song.”
A 20-year-old individual known as Kylie Boggly, who creates online content, is an example of this transformation. “We are currently in a crucial era for forgotten media that will be remembered fondly in the future, and I am thankful to be a part of it,” she expresses.
“Boggly notes that EKT is the key representative of the “lostwave” movement, which aims to unearth and identify obscure songs that have been forgotten or stored away in old MP3 files. There is also another enigmatic song known as “the most mysterious song on the internet” that has remained unsolved for nearly 20 years, but Boggly observes that EKT has gained even more popularity. Boggly doubts that the artist responsible for EKT will remain a mystery forever.”
A major challenge is the lack of consensus on the lyrics due to the low quality of the sound. There is also uncertainty surrounding the gender of the singer. However, online detectives have identified the specific drum machine and synthesizer used in the song, likely the LinnDrum and Yamaha DX7, which suggests a release date after 1983. They have also examined the background frequencies and determined the DVD format used by the uploader, Carl92. Despite these efforts, forensic analysis has not been successful in definitively identifying the song.
Many musicians with similar names, such as Roxette, Savage Garden, and the singer who performed the Pokémon TV theme song, have all been questioned about the mystery song. However, no one has been able to identify it. As a result, many hoaxes have surfaced. Bas remembers one Reddit user who falsely claimed to have heard the song at a McDonald’s in Poland. “This person even went so far as to create fake emails from companies to keep the search community invested in finding the song,” Bas says. “I have to give them credit for their creativity.”
The music track could possibly be an unshared demonstration, or a promotional tune. According to Bas’s hypothesis, it was produced in the United States for a movie or commercial, “and by chance made its way onto a VHS tape. Someone was recording audio in their room while the VHS tape was playing in the background, and stored the file on a DVD and overlooked it.” There are some who believe it may have originated from Japan. At present, Boggly explains, the investigators are attempting to contact an unknown singer named White Mike Johnny Glove, “who possesses an uncannily similar voice” – stay tuned for updates.
Carl92 has disappeared, possibly because he wants to avoid being constantly bothered for hints by internet detectives. Some believe that he may have orchestrated the entire situation – could it be possible that he created the music using artificial intelligence? If so, he has successfully fooled thousands of people. However, there is no proof to suggest that he was not genuine. His nearly-final message expressed a discouraged tone and came a few months after posting EKT, which seems authentic. He wrote, “It’s a dead end. Besides, I’ve lost interest in the song.” Meanwhile, the rest of the world was only beginning to uncover the mystery.
Source: theguardian.com
