Ruminations

The Most Mysterious Song On The Internet has been a haunting memetic legend since 2007, taped by a teenager named Darius from a German radio broadcast in 1984 and uploaded by his sister Lydia on various forums. With its at once melancholy and hopeful melody, stern metallic baritone lead vocal with distinctive melismatic styling, half-intelligible lyrics that invited interpretation and resisted resolution, and urgent sense of youth, passion, and Call To Adventure, the song (known as “Like the Wind”, “Blind the Wind”, “Check It In, Check It Out”, and others, depending on how you construed the words and which line you extracted for the title) quickly became the stuff of endless speculation and urban legend.



A timeline, valid through November 2021:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/p2l92j/uptodate_timeline_and_master_link_post

Patient, diligent, and hyperfixated crowdsourced research has at last cracked the case: it’s “Subways of Your Mind” (1983), by German New Wave band FEX! https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMysteriousSong/comments/1gjbrs6/tms_is_found_the_song_is_called_subways_of_your/

Turns out that at least three of the band members (vocalist/lead guitarist Ture Rückwardt, keyboardist Michael Hädrich, and bassist Norbert Ziermann; drummer Hans-Reimer Sievers has yet to be heard from) are still alive and had had no inkling of their role in an enduring Internet mystery; it must have been like being accosted by a ragtag band of pirates who return the heirloom ring you left in a West German club restroom in 1984. On 4 November 2024, Hädrich provided a cleaned-up version…along with the other two songs on the original cassette EP.



Rückwardt, Ziermann, and Hädrich convened on 7 November 2024 for an acoustic reunion:


Update: Hans-Reimer Sievers, who seems to have withdrawn from music for some time, has come forward; he still owns his old drum kit and band tapes, and it looks as if a full reunion is imminent; dare we hope for new material?

FEX now have an official YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FEXband-official/videos

For no other reason than because I think it’s cool and want to share, having been among the Lucky 10,000 this spring: presenting “The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet”, AKA “Like the Wind”, “Blind the Wind”, “Check It In, Check It Out”, “The Consequence of Living”, and “Summer Moon” among others.

This song, purportedly taped circa 1984 from a West German radio broadcast, has been making the online rounds since 2019–and has stubbornly defied all attempts to establish provenance; part of its captivating oddness comes from the singer’s stern metallic baritone, heavy accent, and melismatic vocal styling unusual for Western pop music of the period.

Furthering the song’s mystery is the tantalizing half-intelligibility of the lyrics, resisting resolution and encouraging open interpretation; even the title is an individual judgment call. It has the air of an artifact captured from a parallel universe.

Nor does it hurt that it’s a 24-karat banger.

Sources:

Sir Terry Pratchett, by Dominic Lipinski, 2011: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Observer/Pix/pictures/2011/6/11/1307803056873/Terry-Pratchett-assisted--007.jpg?width=700&dpr=2&s=none&crop=none

(Crossposted to little_details.)

I’m awed and delighted by the sort of monuments to their obsessive special interests, in sprawling fractal encyclopedic detail, that people have posted on the web to share: there’s an invaluable body of folkademia out there.

1. Flutetunes.com: https://www.flutetunes.com/

Since 2009, the people at Flutetunes.com have been posting a new public-domain flute score every day at 10:00 UTC on the nose, listing the composer, history, key, time signature, BPM, and genre, including downloadable sheet music, MP3s, and MIDIs (the last are adjustable for key and tempo, for the sake of transposition.)

The website's database is exhaustively searchable by genre, nationality, composer, difficulty, and arrangement; this is where I was able to find out that the piece Lizzo famously performed on James Madison’s crystal flute was “Carnival in Venice”, and that the meandering oboe solo that opens “1984” on David Live was in fact Debussy’s “Syrinx.” They’ll even post arrangements of original compositions contributed by volunteers (they’ve got an arrangement of that Creative Commons YouTube and Tiktok favorite, Kevin McLeod’s “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys.”)

Flutetunes.com also includes a variety of other flute resource pages: articles on flute technique; outlinks where one can buy flute sheet music for works still under copyright; a virtual metronome; templates for printable staff paper, and a compilation of further miscellaneous flute-related links. The two site operators are so determinedly anonymous that they won’t even accept donations; they’re the Phantom Flutist Enablers.

2. The World Carrot Museum: https://tinyurl.com/world-carrot-museum

The Junior Woodchucks’ Guide to Daucus carota, courtesy of John Stolarczyk of Skipton, England. Carrot art, biology, cultivation, history, recipes, folklore, and pop culture are all covered here; should you ever need to know about the British government’s propaganda campaign to promote carrots during World War Two rationing (with posters, mascots, and period recipes!), or what the deal is with that lone purple floret on a Queen Anne’s lace blossom, or musical instruments made from carrots, the World Carrot Museum’s happy to oblige.

(Note that the website has been down since September 2022; the above URL is a Wayback Machine archive. Stolarczyk still has an active Twitter devoted to all things carrot: https://twitter.com/carrotmuseum?lang=en)

3. The Museum of Menstruation: http://mum.org

(Warning: the front page is text-only, but some links are NSFW.)

Harry O. Findlay’s Museum of Menstruation is a grand rambling cross-referential time suck covering cultural, historical, medical, and commercial aspects of the subject. Just a few of the topics this display aisle of menstrual esoterica covers: Belts to hold sanitary pads (and if you remember those, you've almost certainly outlived your menstrual worries); artwork with menstrual themes; home remedies for menstrual discomfort sent in by his readers; various religious attitudes toward menstruation; historical menstrual hygiene methods.

Since Findlay has grown old, and doesn't think that he as a cis man is the ideal curator of such a museum, he's sent out an invitation to anyone--preferably a current or past menstruator--interested in taking over his work and hosting his physical collection: http://www.mum.org/future.htm)

Sources, left to right and top to bottom, as far back as I've succeeded in tracing them:

1. Modified from http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/BvtTarYSTB2IZS93wJeXwAa53c-wUsGFgWTMTz0sPhv8soSNN-EHLx3wEvTB63Vp8dviZwRP=w176-h220-p-no; the originator *may* be one Deebo P. Solomon, although their Peperoncity account is now defunct: http://f1.pepst.com/c/29CCD4/332473/ssc3/home/062/deebu.p.solomon/albums/minnal.gif_480_480_0_64000_0_1_0.gif

2.Modified from a post at http://jogosts.blogspot.com/2011/02/wallpapers-gifs.html; the earliest version I've found (June 12, 2010) was downloaded by stissa88 at http://www.ownskin.com/gif_detail?t=c6UFYWU7

3. Here's one whose exact originator I've been able to trace: modified from https://imgur.com/tA78xWb by @fugulolo: https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/1pp01a/rain/?st=jeho0u80&sh=76760203

4. Modified from http://oi47.tinypic.com/2nropyh.jpg.

5. Modified from https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/0ZaV5-iCFhOuu0AJfr5AgjTupTccSUI9IMEITfvWXNAemZcYyQlJK6pdSPe0WPD1WaFp3FCCLBplrFI=w289-h220; the earliest version I've found seems to be by Bia Tomaz.

6. Modified from http://files.fatakat.com/2010/5/1272891685.gif.

7. Further color modification of the source of #2.

8. Taken from http://f0.yomowo.org/c/298B07/224905/ssc3/home/015/clo176x220/albums/rain190210_1.gif_480_480_0_64000_0_1_0.gif, and appearing earlier at http://www.umnet.com/pic/diy/screensaver/1/Rain-19813.gif; both are now defunct.


9. Modified from http://www.animated-gifs.eu/category_nature/phone-240x320-rain/0118.gif.

...I can't quite bring myself to jettison my LJ entirely, having accumulated a body of reference and correspondence that I want to retain; that said, my present and future online homebase is:

http://full-metal-ox.dreamwidth.org/profile

ETA: For the sake of cross-reference, my LJ is here: http://full-metal-ox.livejournal.com/profile

And here's my AO3 account: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Full_Metal_Ox/works

I’m also on SquidgeWorld: https://www.squidgeworld.org/users/Full_Metal_Ox/works

From Froborr on My Little Po-MO:

The other night, I was rereading Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, and I wondered: would Ferguson be as bad as it is if all cops were required to read the Watch books?

And the answer is, of course, yes, because the human ability to compartmentalize and justify via special pleading is infinite, but still, I can't help but think that things might be slightly better if the prevailing cultural image of cop-as-hero was more Vimes and less Dirty Harry.

The following passage comes from page 138 of Proofiness: How You're Being Fooled By the Numbers by Charles Seife. The source is an anonymous statistician, the context is a discussion of disputed elections, and the formatting is my own.

Humans counting things:
I don't care what the things are--
They're going to be off.

...on a day that makes the distinction between icing and frosting moot, both being in devastating abundance.

Your virtual birthday present: could I interest you in some strapping young military men (not Israeli, regrettably) performing an energetic Broadway musical number?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbLwmUdee64