Entire online communities have developed around naming this 17-second snippet of catchy pop – and three years after it was uploaded no one has solved the mystery
It’s only 17 seconds long, and sounds a bit like 80s-era Genesis playing at the bottom of a swimming pool. But this snippet of bouncy yet sonically degraded pop has become one of the biggest and most enduring musical mysteries on the internet.
The clip was uploaded in 2021 by someone called Carl92, who wanted to know if anyone could identify it. “I don’t remember its origin,” he wrote on a site called WatZatSong, saying he found it “between a bunch of very old files in a DVD backup … it sounds somewhat familiar to me.” But even after the 17-second sample was posted on Reddit, where the mighty pop-culture hive mind rarely fails, not a single person managed to identify the song or the artist.
