This weekend, a three-year internet odyssey finally concluded in a perfect reminder that it’s still possible to have fun on the World Wide Web. This story has it all: a missing song, a prevailing mystery, a collective, Reddit-based quest, TikTok users unintentionally embarrassing themselves, and porn. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
It all started back in 2021. A user called Carl92 posted a 17-second snippet of an 80s-style track on a music identification forum called WatZatSong. At the time, they claimed to have discovered the clip “between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup” that they had created while learning to capture audio. The short chorus is an ultra-earworm that sounds like it should have been on Stranger Things, not to mention multiple Billboard charts. So the internet naturally lost their minds. You can listen to Carl92's upload below:
Doesn’t it sound like someone must have bopped along to this while they teased their curls or walked to an aerobics class or something? At least 48,000 people in a subreddit dedicated to the hunt for the full song—colloquially deemed “Everyone Knows That”—thought so. People scoured physical and digital archives for any sort of hint about the identity of the artist, album, or recording studio. TikTokers made (now hilarious) POV videos clad in ‘80s garb imagining themselves as their moms and aunts jamming along to the track. Conspiracy theories claiming the song was either AI-generated or a viral marketing stunt from a modern indie band started to crop up. Even Rolling Stone and The Guardian got involved. But as this all blew up, Carl92 went quiet.
Eventually, these intrepid detectives started to sift through a series of song publishing databases, which eventually narrowed the mystery down to a handful of rights holders from the mid-’80s listed under the song’s other presumed title, “Ulterior Motives.” (This phrase also appeared in the original 17-second clip.) This was the ultimate skeleton key for user One-Truth-5867, who—along with another Reddit user called south_pole_ball—finally uncovered the truth this past weekend. The song was written for a porno.
That’s right—after three whole years, these two brave, brave people were among the first to listen to “Ulterior Motives” in its entirety after combing through literal hours of hardcore porn. One-Truth-5867 was the first to make the connection, after boldly admitting to the internet that they “found a video on YouTube of a scene from an adult movie that had a song which sounded very similar to EKT.” That track was credited to writers Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth in the video’s description, and let’s just say this wasn’t their first rodeo in the porn music composition space.
After watching through more of Booth’s oeuvre, south_pole_ball finally hit the climax of the quest. (You can read his full breakdown, including an obviously NSFW link to the movie in question, here.) The song in its entirety can be found around the 1:07 mark in Angels Of Passion, a 1986 porn film that actually has its own IMDb page, which describes it as follows: “Two angels (Jessica Wylde & Tracey Adams) are sent back to Earth to provide some sexual satisfaction to the mortal humans.” Rule 34 strikes again, baby!
You can now listen to the song in full both with moans and without (below), thanks to some speedy sound isolation by other participants in this massive journey. The news even found its way to Christopher Saint Booth himself, who posted a photo of the AI image most commonly associated with the song on Instagram yesterday, along with the caption: “Well today, my mind has officially been blown:) WOW! #ulteriormotives #ekt.”
As for Carl92, we’ll probably never know what happened to the person who started it all. We do know that there’s a 99.99% chance they lied about the origins of the clip and knew it was from a porno the whole time because the 17 seconds that found their way to the mainstream just so happened to be the longest moan-free segment from the film. Are they an evil genius rubbing their hands together in triumph over this successful wild goose chase? A benevolent internet anti-hero looking to bring back some Meta-free fun? Just an extremely embarrassed teenager who didn’t want to admit they was jerking off? We’ll probably never know, but we salute them.