It’s a musical mystery that has been confounding the internet for years. But an ultra-catchy 80s-sounding song that seemingly no one could identify has finally been tracked down — in a 1986 adult movie.
A snippet of the song, known as Everyone Knows That — a low-quality, warped recording that nevertheless showed off the song’s huge pop appeal — was uploaded to YouTube in 2021 and shared on Reddit, where it sparked a hunt for the creator. Some 47,000 people became dedicated to the quest in a subreddit community. Theories abounded that the song was a lost demo by artists including Roxette and Savage Garden, or had been written for a forgotten advertisement. The Guardian, Rolling Stone and BBC Radio 4’s Today Program were among those reporting on the search.
LOSTWAVE
Reddit users began combing song publishing databases for Everyone Knows That and its other guessed-at title, Ulterior Motives, narrowing it down to a series of rights holders from the mid-1980s.
One user, south_pole_ball, found that one of the listed songwriters, Christopher Booth, had written work for pornographic films — and duly watched his oeuvre until he heard the song. “I went through each video and watched them, until I found Angels of Passion (1986),” they wrote. “To which I got to 1:07:31 and I found Everyone Knows That.”
Booth seemed to corroborate the discovery, posting a picture of the original YouTube upload to Instagram and writing: “Well today, my mind has officially been blown:) WOW! #ulteriormotives #ekt.”
The full version of the song, credited to Booth and his brother Philip, can only be heard alongside the movie in question, accompanied by carnal sound effects, leading to hundreds of requests for an original version to be released. A re-edited, non-pornographic version without the sound effects — but still in low fidelity — has been created by admirers in the meantime.
The Booth brothers have gone on to form a successful partnership in low-budget horror films and documentaries, with Christopher continuing to deploy his musical skills as a composer on their projects.
The song was part of a wider community known as “lostwave,” with members dedicated to identifying forgotten pieces of popular culture.
“We live in a time when knowledge is freely available to us and we can consume music without much restriction,” one of the moderators of the Everyone Knows That subreddit, Bas, said of the appeal of lostwave. “Music that is lost in pre-internet times is likely very interesting to younger people, because it’s such a foreign thing to them, to not be able to simply look up the song.”
On April 26, The Lancet published a letter from two doctors at Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) warning that “Taiwan’s Health Care System is on the Brink of Collapse.” The authors said that “Years of policy inaction and mismanagement of resources have led to the National Health Insurance system operating under unsustainable conditions.” The pushback was immediate. Errors in the paper were quickly identified and publicized, to discredit the authors (the hospital apologized). CNA reported that CMUH said the letter described Taiwan in 2021 as having 62 nurses per 10,000 people, when the correct number was 78 nurses per 10,000
As we live longer, our risk of cognitive impairment is increasing. How can we delay the onset of symptoms? Do we have to give up every indulgence or can small changes make a difference? We asked neurologists for tips on how to keep our brains healthy for life. TAKE CARE OF YOUR HEALTH “All of the sensible things that apply to bodily health apply to brain health,” says Suzanne O’Sullivan, a consultant in neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London, and the author of The Age of Diagnosis. “When you’re 20, you can get away with absolute
May 5 to May 11 What started out as friction between Taiwanese students at Taichung First High School and a Japanese head cook escalated dramatically over the first two weeks of May 1927. It began on April 30 when the cook’s wife knew that lotus starch used in that night’s dinner had rat feces in it, but failed to inform staff until the meal was already prepared. The students believed that her silence was intentional, and filed a complaint. The school’s Japanese administrators sided with the cook’s family, dismissing the students as troublemakers and clamping down on their freedoms — with
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
RSS