How Lost Media Added This 90s Alt-Rock Song to Gen-Z's Nostalgic Playlist

Unlike other viral songs that are appropriated to fit a meme, every chapter of Bôa's Duvet complements its eventually usage the moment it would eventually strike a cord in the hearts of netizens, particularly on TikTok.

The band in question was an English funk band who switched genres into alt-rock as it became more popular in 1993 to which they honed in their live performances across England until finally accepting a recording contract with a Japanese company called Polystar and eventually traveling out to Japan to promote a Japan-exclusive debut album, Race of the Thousand Camels.

This was followed up that same year with their first single, Duvet, which became a major hit! Just like the song's namesake, it wraps the listener in riffs purposely crafted to feel like a cozy and comforting blanket, while lead vocalist Jasmine Rodgers portrays mentally spiraling and begging for help with increasing frustration, pent-up emotions which burst forth into a visceral howl by the end of the song.

Around that same time, a public broadcasting station in San Jose area called KTEH had become inspired to cater to growing demographic of their region. You see a wave of college-aged yuppies happened to be moving to the Bay Area for tech positions and this rising demographic happened to be huge sci-fi fans. While some of the shows curated to their tastes happened to be British sci-fi such as Red Dwarf or Doctor Who, the region was also a major hub for the Anime Fandom in The States, San Jose was the site for the first AnimeCon in the U.S. earlier that decade. Thus, began dabbling in the dubbing and airing of animes such as Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ranma 1/2, Urusei Yatsura, Please Save My Earth, and All Purposes Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku.

One of these animes happened to be an anime miniseries dubbed Serial Experiments Lain, a psychological horror that succinctly predicted the paranoia, social alienation, over-reliance, and obsessive-compulsive habits that would come with online life through the metaphor of "The Wired" The theme song for Lain happened to be Duvet.

This was all happening in an era before streaming, a strange liminal time that stood on the threshold of analog reign of cable and video cassette and the promise of a digital future. There was never a 100% guarantee that any show that aired on television would be officially be available for purchase of physical cassettes in stores, except perhaps the most popular of shows, but there was a 100% guarantee that every show would stop airing eventually, and out of these reality, fans across various fandoms developed a hoarder's compulsion to record their every and all of their beloved episodes may never be seen again onto blank video cassettes.

This practice was an art form of obsession and collaboration. First beginning with researching the episodes list of their often niche series, which on the rather young internet, often meant consulting webpage of a fellow member of the fandom. Next this individual would have to cross-reference this list with the scheduled air times on TV guides, Finally came the recording the episode, quite deceptively the hardest of all the steps. These were regular people with jobs. Sometimes this task required entrusting a friend who happened to be free, other times fans would organize online who was free to tape certain episodes. Depending on the circumstances, this included follow-up steps of distributing these bootleg copies to each other in the group, undoubtedly these fans utilizing cyberspace to remedy these analog shortcomings must have felt like they were living in the future, a 21st-century solution to a 20th-century problem.

An example of bootleg anime tapes

OtakuD50 happened to be such fan, dedicated to the collection of animes as they aired on KTEH, which happened to be Serial Experiments Lain amongst many others featured during the original block, then 20 years later in 2020, perhaps to curb the lockdown boredom of the global pandemic, he dug out the old and began binging the old anime tapes with a friend. Because these were recorded straight off the television broadcast many artifacts of history often got captured as well, commercials, bumpers, etc. Most interesting to them was a video pledge drive being broadcasted beside the ending credits of Sakura Wars, in which KTEH Chief Executive and mustache king, Thomas Edward Fanella, calls upon anime fans for donations for them to keep on delivering more animes to The States. The friend casually recommended uploading the video to YouTube in case anybody would find such a specific and niche thing interesting.

Of course, the internet did!

This upload caught the attention of, Kenny Lauderdale, a content creator devoted to older and obscure anime, who reached out and begged OtakuD50 to dig around for any more footage that he could possibly use to make a YouTube video.

Kindly obliging to sift through his collection, he notice that the opening title sequence to one of his recording of Lain’s 7th episode Society. The thoughtful theme song, now distorted by the 20 year old age of the tape, strummed reflectively to the melancholy visuals of an emotionally-disconnected teenage girl meandering barren city streets, frightened by an ominous murder of crows until all of time stops, and she continues on alone. This entire sequence of which was haunted with a small white text scrolling along the top of the screen, reading:

“KTEH wishes to acknowledge this week’s tragic events and express our deepest concern and sympathy to those most closely affected. In deference to this extraordinary American tragedy, KTEH is postponing The Travel Auction, originally scheduled for this time.”

The whole thing was unsettling and foreboding, as if OtakuD50 had found a real-life an analog horror. His suspicions started to rouse surrounding the message. He just had to be certain! Double-checking the original air date of the episode, sure enough, this message was referring to The Terrorist Attack on the Twin Towers. He had been sitting on a huge media find nobody even new needed searching for.

Three days after the events of 9/11, the USA Patriot Act would pass, making it easier for the US Government to spy on ordinary citizens by expanding their authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank information and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet. launching a brand new era in surveillance just in time to be mutated further by the rise of web 2.0 and the commodification of user data.

The coincidental nature of this found media couldn't have made a more poignant piece, a new ticker about the tragedy that kicked off a The Surveillance Era of the Internet superimposed over the late-90s anime that not only explored the ramifications of what was this fledgling technology entering our lives. it was practically as if Lain Iwakura was communicating with us through The Wired.

What wasn't coincidental was how this piece of found media immediately inspired Duvet to find new life on music-focused platforms, particularly TikTok, where the song would first trend August 2021, depicting the POV of laying in their lap in a sort of "this could be us but you playing" implication.

However, within that same month, the song's capacity to portray nostalgia, solidified by the lost media that had initially shot it back into the limelight, quickly settled it into its more predominant usage within TikTok's cultural milieu, becoming the go-to song for portraying late-90s to Y2K through slideshows of childhood memorabilia, beloved places, and shared experiences of that time. A time before 9/11, before the Surveillance Era, when things seemed simpler, when one wasn't in the constant presence of an unknown number of eyeballs.