Viral Lost Song ‘Ulterior Motives’ Found In Obscure ‘80s Porn Flick

The lost media community has been thrown into a tizzy with the unexpected news that Ulterior Motives – the ultra-viral “lost song” also known as Everyone Knows That – has officially been found, nearly three years after the search began.

The wide-reaching search for Ulterior Motives kicked off in 2021 when the mysterious Carl92 (whose actual identity never emerged) posted a 17-second snippet of the track, supposedly ripped from a DVD backed up from a cassette recording, to the music identification website WatZatSong. It went on to become the site’s most popular entry, but Carl92 himself disappeared shortly after making the post.

The search gathered steam in the lost media community – particularly among fans of lostwave, which specifically focuses on unidentified music – in late 2022, and broke through to the mainstream earlier this year when the aforementioned snippet went viral on TikTok. A forum on Reddit cropped up in June of 2023, and has since garnered some 44,000 followers.

Over the years, dozens (if not hundreds) of leads were put forward, investigated and debunked, all to no avail. Overnight, though, the mystery of Ulterior Motives finally came to an end when two moderators of the r/everyoneknowsthat subreddit were able to identity the track – in its entirety, to boot – in the obscure adult film Angels Of Passion.

The film was initially released in 1986, and the rip that Ulterior Motives was identified from was uploaded to the internet in 2018. The entire song can be heard at the 1:07:31 mark of this upload, however it is worth noting that Angels Of Passion is literally hardcore porn, so if you’re reading this article at work, maybe stick to the re-rip that someone ever-so-graciously posted on YouTube (below).

As for the song itself, Ulterior Motives is indeed its actual title, and it was minted sometime after 1983 by siblings Christopher Saint Booth and Philip Adrian Booth. Notably, those names were flagged by Reddit user u/HeyScarlett last August, when they identified a song by the same name registered in the Canadian music database SOCAN.

At the time of writing, neither of the Booth brothers have commented publicly on the song or the internet’s mammoth effort to find it. They have been reached out to.

Prior to the emergence of Ulterior Motives, some creative fans took it upon themselves to interpret what the rest of the song might sound like. A full-length “cover” was released by the artist Swofford in January of this year, a few months after an unnamed fan issued a version dubbed World Of Lies, partially made using AI.