For some time now, anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection can easily find out the title and author of a song. If there was ever a need to hum the tune to the right friend or grab a few words of possible lyrics to determine the title via the Internet, the proliferation of music discovery services like Shazam and SoundHound makes it possible to search by name and artist of the songs we hear has become a simple, immediate task for everyone.
But for the past few years, there has been a song that thousands of people think about every day. It’s a 17-second recording uploaded to WatZatSong (a social network created to allow users to collaborate in identifying the titles of little-known songs) in 2021 and posted to “Everyone Knows That.” that”) was renamed Name some of the words that you can distinguish when listening to it. The sounds are very similar to those of the so-called New Wave, a genre that became popular in Europe between the late 70s and early 80s after the emergence of punk, and the refrain goes more or less like this: “Everyone knows they have ulterior motives has, tell me the truth” (“Everyone knows she has ulterior motives, tell me the truth”).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHor1eZQKps
Typically, by collaborating and exchanging information, users participating in discussions on Reddit or WatZaTSong can identify the name and author of a song quite quickly. As Miles Klee wrote in Rolling Stone, the case of “Everyone Knows That” was different. No one could figure out what song it was, and this increased interest in the mystery. The song became the most commented song in WatZatSong’s history, and a special subreddit (the discussion forums on Reddit divided by areas of interest) called r/everyoneknowsthat was also created: it currently has more than 5,000 subscribers. Every day they share their theories about the origins of the song.
“Everyone Knows That” was uploaded to WatZatSong in 2021 by a Spanish user whose nickname is “Carl92.” The file was called “Pop – English,” and in the description the user added “mid 80s, poor quality.” (Everyone knows that)”, so: “Mid 1980s, poor quality. (Everyone knows that)”. In the first comment, he wrote that he restored the audio clip from “a bunch of old files in a DVD backup.” Then Carl92 left WatZatSong and since then it has never been known what happened to him.
This is also why the idea that it could be some kind of hoax or scam is spreading in the “Everyone knows this” discussion forums. A popular hypothesis is that Carl92 voluntarily spread a fake for fun: someone suggested that “Everyone Knows That” may have been created by Carl92 himself using artificial intelligence software, even if that was in 2021 (the year in which the piece was uploaded to WatZatSong). These technologies were still poorly developed and it would hardly have been possible to create a song from scratch that sounded so authentic and coherent.
Among the many who believe that “Everyone Knows That” is a real song, all sorts of theories have spread: some suggest that it is an extrapolation from a ’90s MTV show, others suggest that it is could be a commercial jingle or an unreleased demo (a rough and preliminary version of a song recorded on a cassette, CD or other medium) by a group that never achieved success.
One user even said he was sure he heard “Everyone Knows That” in 2012 while dining at a McDonald’s restaurant in Poland, suggesting that the song was included in a collection of Muzak (a term that refers to this Type of music may be commercial, easy to listen to and undemanding, often played as background music in various environments), published by Nichion, a Japanese company, which however has announced that it is not aware of the song.
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Klee also said that over time a small cult has formed around “Everyone Knows That”: “People who were passionate about the story recorded remixes or covers.” [la reinterpretazione o il rifacimento di un brano musicale, ndr], imagined the hypothetically missing verses, used artificial intelligence to arrange longer versions of the song, and invented hoaxes about its possible origins. But one certainty remains: no one knows who composed “Everyone Knows That.”
In an interview with Klee, “Cotton–underground,” the nickname of one of the moderators of the r/everyoneknowthat forum, said that people are probably intrigued by this song because it seems like something out of time to rack your brains around to identify it. “In 2023, when everything is digital and music is available to everyone, it is very inspiring for young people that this song can no longer be found.”
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Klee also recalled that the story of “Everyone Knows That” is similar to that of another never-identified song, “Like The Wind,” also known as “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet.”): Today it is suspected that this was made from one German radio broadcast from the early 1980s, but it is actually an unconfirmed hypothesis. Users have also coined a specific term to identify songs of this type: “lostwave,” i.e. those songs whose origin, author, title and original recording date are unknown.
