The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
You might remember it as Like the Wind, Subways of Your Mind
Videos everybody knows10 of 40
2019·The platform era·amazing
A song taped off German radio in the 1980s that nobody could identify, and that thousands of strangers spent seventeen years chasing.
Keep watchingStill to come
What this wasThe story
A cassette recording, made from a Northern German radio broadcast around 1984, of a new-wave song with an unmistakable hook and no known artist or title. It was uploaded in 2007. Nobody could name it. From 2019 the search became a collective effort across Reddit and Discord, and volunteers went through station playlists, German band directories, record fairs and archives.
It first appeared in 2019, during the platform era. A surviving copy is on YouTube.
It is the purest example of the internet's capacity for extremely patient, entirely unpaid collective research on a question of no importance whatsoever. Contributors learned German, catalogued 1980s regional scenes, and built databases — for seventeen years — to put a name to four minutes of music.
On 4 November 2024 a Reddit user identified it as "Subways of Your Mind" by Fex, a band from Kiel, confirmed by a 1985 EP and a live recording. The band members were traced and found to have had no idea. In January 2025 the daughter of the band's keyboardist posted to the community her father had unknowingly kept waiting.
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This began as a recording of sound, not as a video. Originally published on broadcast.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaPlayable from the source
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. What it began as is recorded here, and what is shown is a later copy.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as a recording of sound, not as a video. Originally published on broadcast.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A cassette recording, made from a Northern German radio broadcast around 1984, of a new-wave song with an unmistakable hook and no known artist or title. It was uploaded in 2007. Nobody could name it. From 2019 the search became a collective effort across Reddit and Discord, and volunteers went through station playlists, German band directories, record fairs and archives.
- Where
- Known on YouTube.