The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

Lost media still needs the human touch to be unearthed.

In my hometown of Syracuse, there are a couple of notable pieces of lost media. I’m sure there are more, but I’ve put some time and energy into two in particular. I’m going to start this story with those, just to get them out there before I dig into “the most mysterious song on the internet,” which is no longer mysterious.

Oscar

First of all, there’s Oscar. Every fall, “missing” posters go up for Oscar, a giant, animatronic ogre that used to stand in the center of Switz’s, an arts & crafts store just north of Syracuse that went hard into decorating for the holidays. Switz’s had a giant area for Oscar (along with an animatronic skeleton band, other miscellaneous decorations, and a coffin from which a costumed “count” would arise and give kids lollipops), and that area was basically the same size and layout as the ones for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

After Switz’s closed, Oscar was sold. He ended up at one of Syracuse’s most prominent gay bars, a place called Ryan’s Someplace Else, but after the bar closed down and its owner passed away, nobody has any evidence of what happened to the animatronic.

The skeleton band eventually reappeared in Oswego — a city about 40 minutes north of here — but the people who owned it had no idea what had happened to Oscar. There have been plenty of searches, and a number of hoaxes in the years since.

This year, things have been busy on the Oscar front. A fairly small YouTuber did a dedicated video about the search for Oscar, which was a mixed bag: some new information, some previously-discredited information. A much bigger lost media YouTuber took on the story, but sourced his video so completely from the first one that he even copied the original video’s mispronunciation of “Switz’s.”

Last month, somebody went on local radio to claim he owned the animatronic, that it was in bad shape and was being refurbished, but provided no meaningful evidence. It seems likely it’s either a radio station hoax, or a previous bad-faith actor returning with his same story for a new audience.

Shopping at Camillus

This is one that I have spent way more time on than I have the Oscar search, as a matter of hands-on looking.

Growing up, I remember a series of ads — they ran during the day on Nickelodeon, at least, and likely also on local channels and maybe ESPN or CNN Headline News, both of which I watched religiously back then for Cleveland baseball scores. The ads were for the Camillus Mall, a shopping center that is now long gone.

The thing people want to find is its jingle. It’s one of those boppy, driving advertising jingles that isn’t, musically, all that good…but it sticks in your head and never lets go. So, in terms of advertising, objectively good.

“Going shoppin’ at Camillus Mall…”

A friend of mine, Steve Alexander (check out his GoFundMe here), pointed out to me once that despite how long that ad campaign ran, and how memorable it was, nobody seemingly has a copy of any recording of the song. So if you have any home-recorded VHS tapes that feature local Syracuse broadcasts from the late ‘80s through the mid ‘90s, maybe give them a scan. I’ve scanned dozens here, with no luck so far.

And now, the point of all this.

Subways of Your Mind

In the 1980s, a German teenager used to record songs off the radio and onto mix tapes. Like most people doing this, the teenager — called Darius for the purposes of retelling the story — didn’t want DJ banter in the songs, and so often excised the introductions (where, presumably, the songs might be identified).

That came back to bite him years later, when he rediscovered an old mix tape and found a song he loved — but couldn’t identify. His sister took to the internet for help in 2007, but since it was identified on Monday, I think you can guess how that went.

The song has become the subject not only of a years-long search involving thousands of people on Reddit, but also of numerous video deep-dives from the likes of Justin Whang and Decoding the Unknown on YouTube. If I recall, it was Whang who christened the song — then widely believed to be called “Like The Wind” — as “the most mysterious song on the internet.”

It was found through a rather extraordinary level of boots-on-the-ground research, as one Redditor investigated bands who had competed in a local radio contest in the mid-80s. It’s much more involved than that, but that isn’t the point of all this.

What’s interesting to me is that, a year ago, if you had asked me what the two most significant “lostwave” searches were, I would have said “Everyone Knows That” and “Like the Wind.” In the space of about seven months this year, both have been found (although neither went by the title fans had given it).

I spoke with Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth, the brothers behind “Ulterior Motives” (a/k/a “Everyone Knows That”) back when their song was first discovered. After about five years of searching, it was found by scouring through a bunch of 1980s adult films, to which the Booths had licensed a number of pop songs for soundtracks.

Something that’s interesting to me about both “Ulterior Motives” and “Subways of Your Mind” (the real name of “Like The Wind”) is the way they were found: with regular old shoe-leather detective work. One would think that, at some point, you would be using artificial intelligence to attack these problems in a novel way that could try and retry dozens of different approaches in rapid succession, but that method has not yet proven useful in these cases. The same can be said for a number of other recent searches that finally yielded results after years of work.

The “Celebrity Number Six” mystery — seeking the original photo that was adapted into a pop-art style on a set of curtains — ended after someone contacted the original photographer, who was able to identify his image.

The original location of The Backrooms was found by reverse-searching the image’s earliest known filename and scouring old websites on the Wayback Machine and Twitter search.

In the case of Celebrity Number Six in particular, there were numerous attempts to automate the search using artificial intelligence, and nothing of value was discovered that way.

This tells us not only that these kinds of hunts need many hands to make the work lighter, but also that it’s unlikely that some kind of automated “cheat code” is going to come up with better or faster results.