Mysterious Viral ’80s Song “Everybody Knows That” Finally Identified After Three-Year Hunt
Are you familiar with the internet phenomenon known as lostwave? Someone will upload a song, or a clip of a song, that cannot be identified. Usually, it’s a murky and mysterious piece of music that sounds vaguely familiar — something that tickles people’s memories and seems like it could’ve been a radio nugget from a bygone era. That practice led to the rediscovery of the British indie band Pachinko, whose 2000 demo EP became a subject of lostwave fascination when a 4Chan user found it in a thrift shop. It’s also led to a whole lot of questions about a song that people have been calling “Everyone Knows That,” and that mystery has finally been solved.
Earlier this year, Dazed ran a story on the mystery of “Everyone Knows That.” Someone posted a distorted 17-second clip of the track on the website Whatzatsong in 2021, and it sounded like a lost ’80s pop song, or maybe like an approximation of an ’80s pop song that some Ariel Pink-type lo-fi auteur might’ve made years later. In the past few years, the song went viral on TikTok, and there’s been an entire subreddit with tens of thousands of members dedicated to identifying the track. Over the weekend, they finally figured it out.
As it turns out, “Everyone Knows That” comes from Christopher Saint Booth, a guy who made a lot of music for porno movies in the ’80s and who looks like he would’ve made music for porno movies in the ’80s. (More recently, Booth has been producing SyFy original films.) As TikTok user Jason K. Pargin explains, one of the subreddit’s users heard a YouTube clip of a song that sounded a whole lot like “Everyone Knows That,” then went all through Booth’s work before finding the track in a scene from the 1986 adult film Angels Of Passion.
@jasonkpargin
The full track is called “Ulterior Motives,” and people can now hear the whole thing.
The entire search was news to Christopher Saint Booth, who seems happily shocked to be the subject of internet fascination.
This is one of those rare moments when I would argue that the solution to the mystery is not a disappointment.
