This 3-Minute 1980s Song Baffles Internet Sleuths

Nobody can figure out the group
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 8, 2019 12:33 PM CDT
Updated Oct 12, 2019 1:45 PM CDT

If you took 3 minutes to listen to this song and then were somehow able to identify the group behind it, you'd make a lot of people happy all over the world. Why? As Rolling Stone explains, the song just happens to be nicknamed the "Most Mysterious Song on the Internet." Online sleuths have been trying to figure out who performs it for more than a decade now, to no avail. The quest went viral over the summer, thanks to the efforts of a Brazilian teenager who popularized the hunt on Reddit and YouTube. As David Browne writes, the "song sounds like a synth-pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the Eighties." And indeed, the few clues that exist suggest it came out of Germany, or somewhere else in Europe, in the early 1980s.

Browne recaps the basics of the story, interviewing a man identified as Darius S from Wilhelmshaven, Germany, who used to tape radio broadcasts of his favorite music programs onto cassettes. The song appears on one of those old cassettes (he thinks from 1984), and it sat dormant for decades until his sister posted a snippet of the song online in 2007. Eventually, the full song leaked out, likely because they shared it with others looking to solve the mystery. But after all this time, no answers have emerged. Browne even speaks to the DJ of the old German radio show from which the song was taped (maybe). He's stumped, too, though a bit of a party pooper: "I don't know what all the fuss is about," he says. "If I thought it was the best thing since sliced bread, I probably would be more interested, but I don't think it's a [particularly] interesting song." (Read the full story.)

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