It sounds familiar. It goes like this: 

“You’re counting all the shapes in the sky/Caught up in your world of lies/Everyone knows that/You got/Ulterior motives/Tell me the truth!/Every move shows it…” 

At least you think it does. The clip muffles the first lines enough to render them ambiguous. “In the sky” or “in disguise”? It might be from the ‘80s or the ‘90s, or maybe some invisible decade as incomprehensible to us as the song itself. You can not tell much about it. It ends right there, after 17 seconds.

The only other association with the song is placeholder cover art of a gaudy pink CD player in a barely lit room. The song has no name; this is the exact point. The song itself resembles a sunblock commercial, or maybe the background music of an old Sunday School VHS. An internet community dedicated to searching for the full song and its true artist has dubbed the clip two names, either “Everyone Knows That” or “Ulterior Motives.” WatZatSong user carl92 uploaded the snippet in 2021, claiming to have found it on an old DVD backup. 

Since then, internet sleuths, localized to Reddit and TikTok, have spent tremendous effort searching for the mysterious artist. They have analyzed every bit of the file. Through them, we know that the artist likely used a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a LinnDrum drum machine. Most of what else has been an ongoing search of detours, false leads and dead ends.

“Everyone Knows That” lives in a musical biome known as “lostwave.” Lostwave includes music for which nobody knows the original artist—that is, except for some oblivious person somewhere in the world with the key information. Lostwave has also spawned interest in the hyperbolically titled “The Most Mysterious Song in the World,” found in Germany on a post-punk mixtape. When lostwave investigators finally identify an artist—which you could then call “post-lostwave”—the artists receive a unique sort of publicity.  “D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L” was an EP later discovered to be the work of now-reformed indie rock band Pachinko. “How Long,” a pop rock song found on Russian bootleg DVDs turned out to be from Canadian singer Paula Toledo. Toledo’s case made a part-heartwarming, part-unsettling story of a singer who quit the business and discovered years later that a track she never released commercially somehow attracted hundreds of new fans.

My personal favorite is “Curly Toes.” Music historian Irwin Chusid compiled the track with the second edition of his “Songs in the Key of Z” collection of outsider music. Outsider music itself is a rabbit hole involving independent artists without traditional musical backgrounds whose music as a result sounds strange, campy and often lo-fi. Whoever supplied Chusid with the original tape found it in a dumpster. I can believe it: “Curly Toes” is a screechy Capella track sung by an anonymous, atonal, ageless, Appalachian-accented owner of “curly toes with pink ribbons and bows.” The track creepily mixes both the cadence of a nursery rhyme with the eroticism of putting up “a mighty fine show for a mighty fine man” featuring “no pantyhose.” 

“No pantyhose?!” she blurts out. “You said it right—no pantyhose.” The song embodies camp. The singer elongates the words she attempts to seduce her mighty fine man with: “My CLO-O-O-thing/LIM-ited.”

But the feature that fascinates me the most about “Curly Toes” is not merely the atonal singing or the perfect combination of camp and kitsch. It is not what is in the song, but what is not in the song. No instruments accompany the singer’s ode to her curly toes.  The hiss of tape fuzz inhabits the silence between the singer’s stanzas. The fuzz blankets the song in mystery. It feels like something I am not supposed to hear—not illicit, but as if the tape manifested in the dumpster, as if it escaped some containment, the fuzz being the artifacts of this unknowable realm. The singer could be an alien or possibly just someone too embarrassed to come forward about some ridiculous track she made out of boredom. But if the identity of “Curly Toes” herself ever does surface, I can only give respect to her for composing a folk anthem that sticks to your mind like a lollipop in the summer. 

“Curly Toes” can feel unsettling at first listen, but so can the joyful synth-pop of “Everyone Knows That.” The weird feeling behind lostwave is the disturbance of our cultural attraction to artistic persona. Since before MTV, but certainly accelerated through MTV, popular music has been not only an auditory medium but a visual one. I imagine music cinematically when I hear it. I construct this image of the artist or whatever character the artist constructs in their music. The artist themself can direct these images all they want—Taylor Swift’s music, for instance, has such a visual component that she and her fans categorize them into a consensus of thematic “eras.” A “Swiftie” can envision themself as experiencing an era as a phase of life—I, for instance, am currently in my “Midnights” era. But lostwave deprives the listener of a clear artistic image to idolize. There is no identifiable artist, so thus in our musical culture there really is no artist. No artist, no history, no image. “Curly Toes” exists in only one era, one you can never describe but know it can never be in the present.

The intersection between lostwave, outsider music and lo-fi should not surprise. All three subvert the maxims of popular music, that it should be identifiable, professional and technically clean. The catalog of lostwave implies revivalism. “Everyone Knows That” is straight out of the synthy new wave ‘80s.  “The Most Mysterious Song” is Joy Division-esque post-punk. “Curly Toes” is seemingly primitivist. Whether the modern musical zeitgeist can rarely turn into lostwave is uncertain. On one hand, the flood of uploads of self-released music to streaming results in the profiles of thousands of anonymous artists difficult to track unless you are an NSA agent. On the other hand, this flood gradually shatters the bridge between artist and persona, soiling what would be the lostwave novelty. 

Lostwave persists by blurring between an artist as a real person and an imaginary character and doing so by removing the artist from the equation. It is art without an artist, creation without a creator. For this, despite the rust of its obscurity, lostwave equally has a purity, a supernature, and for that it is beautiful.

Of course, the anonymity of lostwave can be exactly what ruins its novelty. One of the theories behind “Everyone Knows That” is that the song is a hoax perpetrated by carl92, the original uploader. If it is, I would be kicking myself for believing it. The lyrics drown in irony: the track could very well be “caught up in a world of lies,” fooling listeners into a Mandela effect of a frustratingly familiar tune—and “everyone knows that.”

Image from Floppedbad via YouTube