Viral Mystery Song ‘Everyone Knows That’ Identified Thanks to Eighties Porno

Jon Blistein
·2 min read
"Ulterior Motives" (a.k.a. "Everyone Knows That") was written by Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. - Credit: Getty Images
"Ulterior Motives" (a.k.a. "Everyone Knows That") was written by Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. - Credit: Getty Images

After years of stumping listeners, the viral “lostwave” track “Everyone Knows That” has finally been fully identified — all because someone was watching Eighties porno.

To back up a bit, “Everyone Knows That” has been one of the biggest musical mysteries since a low-quality, 17-second snippet was uploaded to the forum WatZatSong back in 2021. The original uploader, a contributor from Spain using the handle “carl92,” described the song as “Mid 80s, Bad Quality,” adding that they’d found it “between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup. Probably I was simply learning how to capture audio and this was left over.”

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Since then, internet sleuths have been trying — and failing — to identify the song. “Everyone Knows That” (a title that came from some lyrics in the snippet) became the most-commented thread on WatZatSong, and it even spawned its own massive subreddit. As Rolling Stone reported last year, the obsessive effort to uncover the truth behind “Everyone Knows That” led to not only trolling and harassment but also an array of hoaxes and fake debunkings.

But now, finally, the real song has been discovered: It’s called “Ulterior Motives” and was made by Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. It appears in the 1986 adult film Angels of Passion, in which (per IMDb) two angels are “sent back to Earth to provide some sexual satisfaction to the mortal humans.”

The discovery was detailed in a post on the “Everyone Knows That” subreddit Sunday. User “One-Truth-5867” said they started to crack the case while watching a scene from a different Eighties porno movie on YouTube that featured a song that sounded a lot like “Ulterior Motives.” One-Truth-5867 recognized Christopher and Philip’s names in the video’s description from BMI and SOCAN’s song registry and shared the lead with another user, “south_pole_ball.” The two proceeded to watch a whole bunch of movies the Booths worked on before finally stumbling across “Ulterior Motives” in Angels of Passion.

“I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped out in the search!!!” One-Truth-5867 wrote. “I am shaking typing all this!!! We are just shy of hitting 40,000 members haha.”

The news even made it to Christopher Booth, who’s been working as a composer, director, and producer for years, mostly on horror flicks and TV series. “Well today, my mind has officially been blown:) WOW,” he wrote on Instagram.

For those curious, yes, you can hear “Ulterior Motives” in full because some kind soul has uploaded a heavily censored, safe-for-work version of Angels of Passion to YouTube. The song starts playing at about the 24:46 mark, and yes, it appears to soundtrack a sex scene.

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