The Least Mysterious Song on the Internet
A few months back, I wrote about a hot new obsession among Reddit perverts: the most mysterious song on the internet. I did this because it doesn’t matter, and part of my problem, my whole bullshit, is I need to write about things that don’t matter or I’ll get sick and die.
Anyway, somebody found the damn thing. Game’s over. Time to hit the parking lot and get in your car you can’t find because it looks like all the other cars. It was made by some German kids who wanted to be Duran Duran, because of course it was, that’s exactly what it sounds like. They played some festivals and opened for Eric Burdon and eventually they got real jobs. They were called “FEX,” which is fine.
There’s a cycle to the content mill and there’s some satisfaction to be had in how predictable that cycle is. It’s pretty much natural law. More than a decade of online obsession leading nowhere? That’s a story. That’s a two-hour YouTube documentary with paid partnerships. More than a decade of online obsession getting a mercy-killing? That’s the last page of the book. Everything else is epilogue. The song could have been made by Jimmy Hoffa and the guys who escaped from Alcatraz and it would still be the epilogue.
After that it’s all boilerplate. Singer’s tech-literate daughter explains the internet to him. The band, made up entirely of regular guys, tearfully reunites at probably a train station. Some radio interviews, a couple acoustic performances, then they’ll get in the studio and re-record it for old times’ sake, then they’ll be surprised that the new recording gets about 1% of the clicks the old one did. The window for monetizing stories like this always closes as soon as you can see the window.
The search for the song didn’t strictly mean anything – it was basically a text-based ARG – but finding it does. The fact is, this is it for “lost media.” It’s done now. Everybody found everything. That’s not literally true, as MGM lost a billion zillion movies in lot fires and Mick Jones still won’t sign off on an official release of Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg, but it is spiritually true. The community, such as it was, used this story as advertising, the final boss of the game. There are no more lost media mysteries that come anywhere close to the Q score this had.
That’s because a good internet mystery has to have a good brand identity. This song had a few things going for it: tape hiss, anonymous Germans, and enough hooks to sound like a slightly uncanny version of a chart hit. That’s why so many people suggested it was from an alternate dimension. It was so close to being normal.
To be mysterious, a song can’t simply be unknown. My cousin has played plenty of sessions that will never get released. He has the only surviving copies of some of these. The bands involved might not even remember doing them. But that’s just something that happens in the music business in California. It doesn’t make you lust after piercing the veil of time. It takes that extra layer of uncanniness. It has to be an unscratchable itch. My grandpa’s brother made some 45s and I may wind up being the last person to own copies of those (if some specifically German collectors don’t outlive me) but they’re so conventionally competent that they’re “worthless.”
It’ll be a huge uphill battle to ever make somebody care about a lost media story like this again. There won’t be an origin story to make. There will still be some detritus from the early internet, some made-for-TV movies here and there, that people will keep looking for, but they’ll be sidequests to the main mission. Western society just doesn’t have a lot of real secrets and the CIA killed Kennedy.
The only thing that could even compete today would basically be an act of God: maybe London After Midnight is in the hands of a lunatic private collector in Amarillo, Texas or hiding under the floorboards of a condemned school for the deaf outside of Edmonton, Alberta. Maybe that would compete. Maybe there are still some unadulterated safe deposit boxes patiently waiting to lose their virtue. But we’re about done here.
Media preservation is still a profoundly huge problem, and now it’s down a spokesman. It’s probably not necessary to digitize VHS tapes you found at a yard sale, but it is necessary to preserve as much of the internet as we can. Doesn’t take a doctor to see that we’re rapidly losing, for example, the “good” era of the internet and it’s being replaced with an ad-sponsored AI simulacrum that doesn’t even pretend to work right. Try researching anything from the early days of the Iraq War and watch how many walls you hit with dead websites. Archives that should exist but don’t. It’ll drive you nuts, and you’ll understand that we’re in a staggeringly fragile era of preserving information. And barring the misnomer of the benevolent billionaire, there’s nothing much we can do but call attention to it.