The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

The internet is bad now. We all know this and it’s not news. It’s not dead, but as a tool and a presence in culture, its glory days are firmly gone and they’re not coming back. Never mind the why because that’s out of our control and can’t be fixed. Just think about the overall experience. Websites as hang-out destinations and communities where you could make friends and waste a whole weekend are basically extinct. There’s no good reason to stay up until 3 a.m. to use it anymore. Search engines don’t even work anymore. It sort of feels like a mall in a mid-size city. You still need to go there sometimes to get glasses fixed or keys made, but it’s unthinkable to linger there and there’s a dull feeling of I swear this used to be fun that you don’t wanna dwell on.

That feeling of discovery, that you might find something, stumble on a secret, learn something, meet authentic weirdos, that era is gone. The barbed wire has come up on the frontier. It’s over, and it’s been over. There are no more discoveries to make. You’ve reached the end. You read it all. Even a theoretically endless content mill like Reddit is something you can kind of complete in a couple weeks. It’s all stuck on an endless loop, it’s all reruns. 

And social media as we know it is not and probably cannot be a substitute for that old feeling of community. Even if all your best real friends are there, it just feels like you’re doing free advertising for sinister companies that algorithmically, complacently push the worst news in the world in front of your face all the time. Someday we’ll probably find out social media is as bad for you as cigarettes. (Social media companies probably know that already and it’ll trickle down to us officially in ten years.)

Unfortunately I still need to use this thing for work, to maintain a footprint on this planet. That’s just how society shook out. It’s the only place to publish writing and it’s the only way to look for jobs. So figuring out how to use it healthily is a huge deal to me. It means, for starters, restricting exposure to news. It means seeking out any weird rabbit holes, especially hobbyist rabbit holes, that are still left. They exist, but it’s like getting a silver quarter in change. Wikipedia crawling is still alright though I’m starting to think I read most of it. On Twitter, I really like the Discontinued Foods account. 

Enter The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet, a phenomenon I still check in on once a week or so, which feels like one of the last rabbit holes left. It’s a community, somehow, that still fascinates me. The story broadly goes like this: in probably 1984, a teen named Darius is hanging out in Wilhelmshaven, in northern Germany. He regularly tapes songs off the radio. One night he’s listening to Musik fur junge Leute on station NDR 1. Tapes a bunch of post-punk and goth stuff. You know most of it; it’s all downstream from Joy Division. But there’s one song where he doesn’t catch the title or the artist. And it bugs the ever-loving hell out of him. He’s been looking for it ever since, and in the last few years a huge Reddit community has sprung up to help him find it.

The song itself is unremarkable. In fact, I strongly dislike it. It’s a dour little bastard. Thing sounds like any number of German or Austrian bands that wanted to sound like XTC or whatever. The melody is hilariously similar to (I Just) Died In Your Arms. Nothing about it stands out. If I was feeling charitable I’d say it was designed to be anonymous, but nobody does that on purpose unless humans still work at the muzak factory (which I picture as somehow having smoke stacks). I never want to hear the song again. I wish that guy had thrown his tape into the ocean.

This song is what they call “lostwave,” a song by an unidentified artist. But it can’t just be the demo tape your cousin made. It has to feel like it could be a segment on a TV show. When people talk about songs like this, become fixated on them, there’s a deep undercurrent of wanting mystery, some virtual equivalent of going out into the Arizona desert in the late 1890s looking for Egyptian artifacts or something. 

We’ve all seen those “lost” album covers, the crazy-looking private press stuff like Ken: By Request Only or All My Friends Are Dead. There’s always a glimmer of hope among lostwave people that maybe you’ll turn that rock over and find something really fucked up. But you know what all those albums basically are? Christian music. Soft Christian music. Sometimes they’re the work of one dude with too much hubris. Like L’Amour, by “Lewis.” I happen to like that one but I know exactly what it is: cocaine romance music from ‘80s Los Angeles. So people tend to gravitate toward goth stuff, anything vaguely spooky. The mysterious song checks that box.

Thing about seeking out flea market detritus like this is that there’s not really a mystery, it just doesn’t have an internet footprint. With some exceptions that usually wind up on the news, flea markets don’t really have anything interesting. There are people who catalog this stuff their whole lives and know exactly what they’re looking for, almost with forensic precision, and you’re not gonna beat them. You can’t play the lottery and plan to win.

Another recent example, maybe the most famous lost song, was called Ulterior Motives, or Everyone Knows That. Long search, huge community, lots of memes and dead leads, and what was it? What was the answer to that bigass mystery? Turned out to be by a horror filmmaker and composer who very well could have met with my wife in Burbank when she worked for The Asylum. Guy recorded it in the valley, by Michael Jackson’s house. It was for a porno film, available on all the websites where you get your pornos.

That’s a fundamentally funny part of being a “lostwave” fan. This stuff is not that good. You’re not gonna find a single-ready demo by The Clash. They would have put that out. Johnny Cash didn’t bury his songs in his backyard. They’re all indexed and filed someplace. What you’re gonna wind up with is downmarket amateur synthpop or downmarket amateur country-folk. Go listen to Joy Division and Jim Croce and you’ll have a better time.

Back to our mystery song. The last big thing in lostwave. Why have I spent years rubbernecking at this community when I want to run it over with my car and take a blowtorch to its corpse? Hell, this thing has a Yamaha DX7 on it. I used to and still do think those things were poison.

Maybe because it’s fascinating to see what people want out of a mystery. This drive to go searching but not finding. To have unanswerable questions. We clearly need those. Some people try to get it from God, some people try to get it from German radio stations 40 years ago. 

And it’s fun to indulge a community where a cross-section of aging European sound engineers and barely literate 15 year old Americans share the same space, in the pursuit of something that doesn’t matter at all. The results of mixing those two are insane. There are tons of people who fantasize that this song was recorded in East Berlin and the band got killed getting over the wall. People who think the singer was a murderer. All sorts of scenarios that would make, frankly, a pretty stupid movie.

And there are yet more people, kids mostly, who think the internet is all-powerful and has been here forever and can still solve our problems, even though it's all flatly garbage now. They endlessly try to parse the lyrics, which are impenetrable nonsense, in the hopes it will make them able to google it. This wouldn’t even work if the thing was on google, but that’s okay, they don’t really care. The end result of all this is a massive search party that’s so dysfunctional that they’ll never find the answer, or they’re not ready to admit they don’t want it.

After awhile though, like with true crime, you tire of gawking at internal politics and other peoples’ gossip and just want some professionalism. Some grasp of the scientific method. There are ways to find answers to things like this. These answers are boring, but I happen to like boring answers. I was thrilled when the Golden State Killer was found through shoe-leather police work. I want to actually know who D.B. Cooper was (was he CIA or work for the airline or what; I love theories about him but after awhile I just think why isn’t this story moving, why is it stuck here?). I want the Zodiac found (I got five bucks says he was in law enforcement or didn’t strictly exist). I get the need for mystery but there’s a time for them to end, for books to close. I hate having stories I’m not done writing. There’s satisfaction in finality, in coming back to earth and realizing it has a pretty concrete set of rules. That we’re all mammals moving in one linear direction through time for 60-90 years and then it’s lights out, usually in some fucking hospital bed.

I want this mystery-if-you-can-call-it-that solved not because I care about the song, but because I want people to hear how normal it really is. How explainable the world is. It’s so much easier to go through life when you can treat it that way. Where’s Amelia Earhart’s plane? It’s in the ocean. Where she crashed it.