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.”
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
RSS