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Update: Hans-Reimer Sievers, who seems to have withdrawn from music for some time, has come forward; he still owns his old drum kit and band tapes, and it looks as if a full reunion is imminent; dare we hope for new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

It may be a while before you're in a position to check this out, but I thought I'd share a beautifully executed fanvid for "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo, set to footage from Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride fro a Danny Elfman trifecta; this is one that I like to cite as a demonstration of how timing and the precise marriage of lyrics to imagery can make a video.

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

JAM Project is a Japanese supergroup teaming the likes of Kageyama Hironobu, Endoh Masaaki, and Okui Masami--think of it as J-Rock's equivalent of the Avengers: an elite task force of the poets laureate of HOT-BLOODED ANIME HEROISM!!!

YouTuber PuppetChaos puts the proposition that JAM Project can make anything awesome to the test: here's the 1976 educational short, "Congruent Triangles" by Bruce Cornwell, set to "The Guardian" (the second Shin Mazinger opening theme):



(As one commenter puts it: "CIRCUMCENTER CANNOOON!!! CENTROID BEEEAAAM!! ORTHOCENTER BLAAAAAAAADE!!!")

A motley grab bag of Metal and/or Rabbit-themed Netgleanings for kosaginolegion:

"Goggles", by The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing (who presumably were completely innocent of The Midnight Bombing Wot 'Appened At Midnight.)

Sundry Metal Rabbits--as well as a Roomba Rider.

A Wallace and Gromit AMV, to the one Oingo Boingo song that gets reliable airplay on 80's Rock stations.

The True Story Behind The Fez (TM) can be shoehorned into qualifying; after all, Bunny Ears Lawyerhood has been a constant throughout the Doctor's incarnations.

Happy fondueing--if that's what they call it!--to you and the Long Suffering Hubby.

...to dochermes!

Have an eclectic grab bag of cybergleanings:

The Green Hornet meets the Amazing One-Man Orchestra.

When Japanese rice farmers get bored.

It's looking like a rainy Summer.

This guy deserves his own action serial.

This 2005 re-enactment cracked up people some of whose parents are too young to remember Ernie Kovacs.

...to dungeonwriter !

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


(Cut me and I bleed trivia: you share your birthday with, among others:

Maria Von Trapp [1905]
Ellen DeGeneres [1958]
Bessie Coleman [1892], the first African-American woman to pilot an airplane.
Morita Akio, [1921] co-founder of Sony.
Gene Siskel [1946]
Philip Jose Farmer [1928], SF legend and creator of the Wold Newton Mythos.
Jules Feiffer [1929]
The Octo-Kids [2009] .)

YouTube is a merry media mosh pit for the worst and the best (and the most mediocre) of what happens when human imagination is presented with audiovisual technology, an arena, and no editor. Unsurprisingly, it's a showcase for Sturgeon's Law, but also for bits of retrieved memory and works of brilliance that make sifting through the dorky karaoke and home movies more than worth the annoyance.

This animated AMV for Vaughn Monroe's rendition of “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, the work of one Pukipu, is one that I've come to regard as the definitive video for the song in question; the stiff, minimal, and primitive flavor of the animation somehow seems perfectly of a piece with the period setting, and its repetitiveness serves the incantatory nature of the song. More than that, it struck me somehow as having an unassailable rightness; the imagery was somehow hauntingly reminiscent of a memory I was at a loss to place:

.

A discussion of favorite childhood TV commercials over on dungeonwriter’s blog helped supply the missing piece of the puzzle; this haunting PSA from the late 60's (the narrative Voice of Impending Doom is variously suspected of being either James Earl Jones or Thurl “Tony the Tiger’ Ravenscroft) was the stuff of nightmares to a lot of people in the late Baby Boom/early Gen-X age bracket:


Pukipu (if her userinfo is accurate) is Brazilian, and too young to remember the ad, making it an unlikely influence; nonetheless, I find the resemblance striking.

In keeping with her fundamentalist Christian beliefs, GOP Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has received a blessing against witchcraft from the Kenyan minister Thomas Muthee (the specific reference occurs at about 1:45):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwkb9_zB2Pg

A possibility that neither Governor Palin nor the Reverend Muthee seems to have anticipated: would this spiritual protection also nullify supportive witchcraft by Palin sympathizers?  (See "The Pagan Temple"'s comment in the thread below.)

http://www.neopagan.net/blog/?p=218#comments

(My long-held suspicion is that the "Go figure" demographic, whether it be on the Red, Blue, Green, or Tie-Dye sides of the Force, is persistently underestimated.)