For years, a  small but heavily engaged community has gathered online, entirely dedicated to the goal of identifying a single elusive song. On Monday,

They Searched Through Hundreds of Bands to Solve an Online Mystery

submited by
Style Pass
2024-11-06 20:30:06

For years, a small but heavily engaged community has gathered online, entirely dedicated to the goal of identifying a single elusive song. On Monday, following an exhaustive search, they announced they’d found it.

Now that "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet” has been located, it leaves behind an entire subculture of “lostwave” music that stretches from cassette tapes to Spotify. Even amid their success, many investigators are unsure about what happens to the community now that its goal has been achieved. What happens to lost media once it’s been found?

We now know the song in question is called “Subways of Your Mind” by FEX, but until Monday, it had lived up to its sobriquet for 17 years. The song was recorded off the German radio station NDR in the early ’80s and was just a question mark on a cassette case until 2007, when it was digitized and posted to various Usenet newsgroups and music forums along with requests for the internet’s help in identifying the track. No one knew what it was.

A 2019 article in Rolling Stone tracks how the song’s ambiguity and retro charm helped draw in a community of music lovers and amateur researchers. The community would grow and shift along with the internet itself, moving from YouTube to Reddit to Discord, eventually coming back to Paul Baskerville, the DJ who would have played the song in the first place. He couldn’t find it in his collection of over 10,000 vinyl records, and talking to Rolling Stone, he admitted, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about [...] I don’t think it’s a particular [sic] interesting song.”

Leave a Comment