Art by Lauren Davis
This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso.
From the sixties to the nineties parents worried messages hidden in rock albums would make their children do drugs and worship the devil. The truth could only be revealed if these records were played backwards. Bryan Gardiner unveils the history behind the backmasking panic and Curiosity Daily’s Ashley Hamer explains why our brains hear hidden messages... even when they’re not there!
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
(phrygian) the chills by Breakmaster Cylinder
Purplebutter NO DRUMS - MELODIC ONLY by Breakmaster Cylinder
Fool by Ryan Taubert
Alaska by Luke Atencio
Hangtime by Fuzzz
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, and hosted by Dallas Taylor.
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View Transcript ▶︎
Hey everyone. A quick heads up. Twenty Thousand Hertz is usually ultra squeaky clean. [music fade in] But due to the subject of this episode, we couldn’t get away from the acknowledgement of more serious things like drugs, death, devil stuff, and rock and roll. It’s actually 95 percent about rock and roll, but the other stuff kinda comes along with the territory. This episode is still clean. No cursing or anything. I just wanted to let you know just in case you’d like to avoid those subjects with the littlest ears. Also, according to some sources, this episode may entice you to worship the devil. You’ve been warned. [music out] So here we go.
.ztreH dnasuohT ytnewT ot gninetsil er’uoY
[music clip: “Better By You, Better Than Me” by Judas Priest]
I want to take you back to 1985. Tragedy occurs in Reno, Nevada. Two young men attempt to take their lives together. One of them dies instantly, and three years later the other dies from complications related to the attempt.
But their parents aren’t convinced the young men acted on their own. The night of the tragedy, they listened to this song.
[music continues: “Better By You, Better Than Me” by Judas Priest]
This is Judas Priest’s cover of the Spooky Tooth song “Better By You, Better Than Me.” In 1990, the young men’s family sued Judas Priest over this song.
[music out]
*[SFX Clip: Dream Deceivers documentary clip at 10:10:
Trial Judge: “What is on trial is whether subliminal messages are present, and if so, if they have an effect upon the listener.”]*
The prosecution against Judas Priest made a big claim. They said secret messages in the song encouraged them to take their lives. And the only way to hear these messages was to play the record backwards.
Listen carefully.
[SFX: Song at 3:00 sounds like “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you”]
Did you hear the words “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you?” Here it is again.
[SFX: Song at 3:00 sounds like “I shot my demons dead when I’m with you”]
[music in]
Adding secret backward messages in music wasn’t anything new. Even before the so-called Satanic Panic in the 80’s and 90’s, people had been playing recorded sounds backwards since the invention of the phonograph.
Bryan: The ability to capture and preserve sound also gave people the ability to manipulate it.
That’s Bryan Gardiner. Bryan wrote about the history of backmasking for Atlas Obscura.
Bryan: When people talk about backmasking in the audio world it's generally considered a deliberate recording process where a sound, whether it's an instrument or a voice is recorded and played backward and then placed somewhere into the forward mix of a song.
Bryan: Sometimes that can be obvious [SFX: music being played in reverse], you're hearing a song and then you hear some sort of weird garbled reverse version. You can kind of make it out. Sometimes it's more hidden in a track, but that's the basic idea of backmasking.
The earliest example of backmasking in popular music comes in the early 60’s from a band called The Eligibles. But their most famous recording has no backmasking in it.
[music clip: Gilligan's Island Season Two Theme
Song: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale/A tale of a fateful trip.”]
That’s right. The Eligibles, who performed the Gilligan’s Island theme song, also had the first backmasking hit. In the late fifties, they recorded this song, called “Car Trouble.”
[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles]
Bryan: It's… about a boy who's taking out a girl on a date in his car.
Bryan: During the song, there's two instances of what sound like really garbled yelling, the first instance is the girlfriend's father…
[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles
Song: “Be back home at half past ten or else” followed by garbled yelling of the dad.]
Bryan: Supposedly the message is, "Now look it here cats, stop running these records backwards."
Let’s hear the piece with the dad yelling again, but this time backwards.
[music clip reversed: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles garbled yelling of the dad played backwards to reveal message.]
[Moment of awkward pause, followed by drumsticks bringing the song back in]
After the girlfriend’s dad yells, the boy and girl go on their date. When they try to come back, the boy’s car won’t start. They have to walk home, show up late, and dad yells again.
[music clip: “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles
Song: “As we walked in the gate I could hear her daddy yell” followed by more garbled yelling of the dad.]
Bryan: The song...says, "Didn't I tell you to get my daughter back by 10:30, you bum?"
[music clip : “Car Trouble” by the Elligibles garbled yelling of the dad played backwards to reveal message.]
[music in: “Rain” by the Beatles]
A few years after Car Trouble, it was the Beatles who really brought backmasking to the forefront of music culture.
Bryan: The Beatles were recording 1966's Revolver. the idea for backmasking made its way into the song Rain.
[music continues: “Rain” by the Beatles]
Bryan: If you listen to it all the way through there's sort of this ending coda.
...and here’s that coda.
[Cut to coda: “Rain” by the Beatles ending coda]
Bryan: And it's just basically a reverse of the first line of the song.
And here’s the coda played in reverse.
Bryan: Bands were actually, legitimately doing this. They were inserting messages, often they were just reversed lyrics in their own songs but in general fans of rock and roll music were aware of this, at least the sort of geeky audiophile ones.
So far this all sounds pretty tame, but it was this next song that was spark that ignited the initial flames of panic.
[music in: “Revolution 9” by the Beatles]
Bryan: In 1969 there was a radio DJ named Russ Gibb and he gets a phone call from a student at Eastern Michigan University and the student claims that…there's this rumor about Paul McCartney, he's been dead actually and replaced by some strange doppelganger Paul McCartney who looks and sounds just like him but is not the real Paul McCartney.
[SFX: record scratch]
(Gasp!) Oh no...
[SFX: record starts to play backwards]
The caller tells Gibb to basically play the Beatles song “Revolution Number 9” backward. Gibb hears the phrase, "Turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man, turn me on dead man…"
[music clip: Reverse “Revolution 9” by the Beatles]
Bryan: So Gibb freaks out and begins telling all of his listeners about what he calls sort of this great Beatles coverup and more and more people start listening for clues and low and behold they found them. Including there was another alleged backmasked message, "Paul is a dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him." And that was in the song “I'm So Tired.”
[SFX: Reverse “I’m So Tired” by the Beatles]
[SFX: tape fast forward]
[SFX: Reverse “I’m So Tired” by the Beatles]
[Slowly fade music in]
The dead Paul messages found by Beatles fans sound stranger and subtler than the ones in “Rain” or “Car Trouble.” Many people, including the Beatles, said that’s because this wasn’t actual backmasking. They didn’t mean to do it.
Keep in mind, this was at a time when people were already worried about subliminal messages.
Bryan: There was this renewed interest in subliminal manipulation and this is largely the result of books. They claimed basically that the general public was being manipulated by ad agencies.
The idea was that hidden messages could get into your subconscious. Once planted there, they could influence the way you think.
Bryan: Supposedly certain images would be inserted on the front box of cigarettes or you could make out naked women in the bubbles in the gin ad in a magazine.
These subliminal manipulations were not limited to visuals. Many believed these backwards messages in songs could also control the way people think and act. To be more blunt, many people believed that backmasking could make you worship the devil.
Bryan: There had always been this idea that rock and roll was the devil's music [SFX: Fade in devil voice under Bryan] and once certain conservative pastors...found out about this, this gave them an opportunity to listen to these things and I guess, in some cases, they literally could hear the voice of the devil...hahaha... [SFX: devil laughter]
[music out]
What these pastors found shocked them. Here’s a clip from the Praise the Lord Show. Pastor Paul Crouch and his wife Jan listen as their son, Paul Junior, plays Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” backwards.
[YouTube Clip: Paul Jr: All right. I’ll slow this down a little bit. Listen for “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”
music clip: “Stairway to Heaven” plays backwards then Paul Jr. stops the tape.
Paul: Did you all hear that?
Audience: Yeah!]
…and it wasn’t just Led Zeppelin. Satanic messages were supposedly hidden all over rock albums. Here’s a backwards version of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Eldorado .” Listen for this message, “He is the nasty one. Christ you're infernal. It is said we're dead men.”
[music clip: Reverse “Eldorado” by ELO]
...and here’s the backwards version of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. The message this time is, “Satan had ‘em. He organized his own religion.”
[music clip: Reverse “Hotel California” by the Eagles]
Beyond that, here’s Styx proclaiming “Satan moves through our voices” in the backwards version of the song “Snowblind?”
[music clip: Reverse “Snowblind” by Styx]
Apparently, there are examples of this all over seventies and eighties rock music. The Praise the Lord Show wasn’t the only one finding these hidden subversive messages.
Bryan: There was a famous pastor, Gary Greenwald, who actually started a sort of backmasking tour where he would travel around the United States and even went up to Canada and would hold basically what are record listening parties where he would play these things for the audience pointing out every time what the backmasked message supposedly was and people would freak out. Often they would be followed by album burning parties or whatever...He also had a television show briefly where he would do these sorts of things as well.
[YouTube Clip:
Gary Greenwald: Is it possible that this could be preparing us subconsciously through backward masking to accept a child that is coming that is none other than the son of Satan? Let me play that for you backwards and you tell me who the child is. Listen carefully (music plays)”]
[music in]
By this point, many had gone into full blown Satanic Panic. So, obviously, the next step was for the government to put a stop to it.
Bryan: Starting in the early 80s, you saw an uptick in actual legislation aimed at combating backmasking.
A member of the California State Assembly created a panel to investigate satanic messages in “Stairway to Heaven” and other songs.
Bryan: He gathered all these witnesses, he gathered a person who purportedly was a neuroscientist who explained how these backward messages were influencing or could influence kids who didn't necessarily play the albums backward and then it kind of just snowballed.
The call for local legislation turned into a cry for national laws. Now, it was time for the US Congress to get involved.
Bryan: People were actively introducing legislation and trying to pass bills that if not outlawed the practice, mandated warning signs on all the albums that supposedly had these nefarious messages on them.
Rock bands and producers claimed the backwards messages were completely and totally unintentional.
Bryan: Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots.
Bryan: Led Zeppelin's record label issued one statement based on the backmasking controversy which was, "Our turntables only rotate in one direction."
So when tragedy struck in Reno Nevada in 1985, the music industry was already under a microscope for backmasking.
And even though none of these laws actually passed, the Judas Priest trial in 1990 had everyone in the music industry watching. If the band lost, it would set a precedent that anyone can be sued for backwards combinations of sounds creating an unintentional message. We’ll get the verdict. Plus, the brain science behind backmasking... after this.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in]
In the late 80s the Satanic Panic was in full swing. Parents, government officials, churches, and even some scientists believed that backwards messages in rock songs influenced young people in terrible ways. Then in 1990, Judas Priest were being sued over hidden commands in their songs which allegedly influenced two people to take their lives. If they lost this case, it would mean that any band could be held liable for the actions resulting from their supposedly hidden messages.
[SFX clip: News report: “In a one hundred eight page written decision, judge Jerry Carr Whitehead found that Judas Priest and CBS Records are not liable in causing the deaths. The judge also ruled that there is no proof of backwards masking on the album, and in any case, no scientific proof that backwards making can be perceived or affect conduct.”]
In the end, Judas Priest, and the music industry, were cleared of all charges. And no matter if it's intentional or accidental, they proved backmasking can’t control your thoughts.
Still, backmasking had become a really, really big deal. Some musicians today still use it to place intentional messages in their songs. Albeit, usually to poke fun at the whole controversy. Here’s an example from Weird Al Yankovic’s “I Remember Larry.” See if you can understand what he’s saying...
[music clip: Reverse “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic]
So, what Weird Al was saying was “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands. Here it is one more time.
[music clip: Reverse “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic
Song: “Wow you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”]
Despite the music industry’s efforts, many people still hear unintentional backmasking messages. Here’s an ironically titled song from Cheap Trick called “Gonna Raise Hell.” See if you can make out the message...
[music clip: Reverse “Gonna Raise Hell” by Cheap Trick]
You can hear a big difference between the two. Weird Al’s message is clear.
And Cheap Trick’s message is much harder to understand. Supposedly they are saying “You know Satan holds the keys to the lock.”
Here it is again.
[music clip: Reverse “Gonna Raise Hell” by Cheap Trick]
Ashley: I think it is pretty evident in the difference you hear between songs that have intentional backmasking and songs that don’t necessarily.
That’s Ashley Hamer, the managing editor for Curiosity.com and the co-host of The Curiosity Daily Podcast. Ashley wrote about backmasking for the website.
Ashley: I'm actually also a freelance musician. I have an undergrad and a master's in jazz performance.
So, she’s uniquely qualified for this particular topic.
Ashley: When it's intentional, you hear a very clear voice saying something. But when you hear these unintentional ones, it sounds like a ghost, like someone who can’t quite talk, they’re trying to speak through a vale or something. And the same is true when you turn them backward.
Here’s that backwards message in Weird Al’s “I Remember Larry”... but this time played forward.
[music clip: “I Remember Larry” by Weird Al Yankovic]
It sounds a lot like all those unintentional backwards messages.
Ashley: It sounds satanic. Its sounds ghostly.
Ashley: I don't think there is a human on earth who can actually talk like that. Bob Garcia of A&M Records once said, "It must be the devil putting these messages on the records because no one here knows how to do it."
Ashley: When you see the kind of backmasking that has become famous, the inadvertent backmasking, it's pretty simple and it doesn't really make a lot of sense. Like, they're not really things that people would normally say like, like “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.
Ashley: "Here's to my sweet Satan,"[music clip: Reverse “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin “Here’s to my sweet Satan.”] it only has one two-syllable word in it. Everything else is just a single syllable. And that's how a lot of these supposed backmasking messages are. They're very simple, they're just syllable by syllable, and a single syllable can sound like a lot of different things.
[music in]
Even if the words are simple, these unintentional noises sound like language. This concept is called pareidolia. It basically means that humans really like to find patterns, sometimes in places where there are no patterns. It's the same reason you might see a face on Mars or a bunny rabbit in a cloud. Our minds are constantly on the look out to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes we turn things that don't actually make sense into things that do.
Ashley: But the big thing with backmasking is the idea that we really love language. It's really important for us to be able to communicate. It is basically what keeps us alive. If we can't tell each other our needs, if we can't get mates, if we can't tell each other that, "Oh, I found this food over here. Let's go get it," we're not really going to survive.
Our brain is hardwired to find messages. We are so good at picking out language that sometimes we do it by accident. That’s because our brains processes information in two different ways: bottom up, and top down.
Ashley: Bottom up processing is basically when you build things from the ground up, you have a texture or a color or a shape and you kind of figure out what it is from all of the details. But top down processing uses kind of that higher order thinking where you're thinking about context and what you've experienced before and what you kind of know about the situation to form a judgment. That's how we interpret language.
[music out]
Our brains particularly hear language if another person primes us by telling us what to listen for. Here’s an example from Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” played backwards. I’m not going to tell you what it is.
[music clip: Reversed “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen]
If you didn’t know what to listen for, you probably heard gibberish. Here it is again. Now listen for the message, “It’s fun to smoke marijuana.”
[music clip: Reversed “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen]
Ashley: When someone tells you that a bunch of noise actually is saying, "It's fun to smoke marijuana," you're going to hear it because your brain is using that higher order information that has already told you that this is language to hear the thing that you're told to hear.
And an early 80s study in the Journal of Science backed up Ashley’s point.
Ashley: They divided the participants into three groups and the first group was just asked to describe what they heard. They weren't told anything else.
They heard something like this.
[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]
Ashley: And most of those people said they heard things like science fiction sounds or animal cries.
Ashley: Researchers played people sign wave speech. It's real speech, but it's artificially degraded so that any evidence of a message is completely lost and there are only certain frequencies leftover. So if you were to listen to this without any context, it would just sound like noise, which is kind of what backmasking sounds like.
Ashley: The second group was told that they would hear an actual sentence that was produced by a computer and they were asked to write down what that sentence said.
Ok, now that you know this is human speech, let’s hear it again. See if you can pick out any words.
[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]
And again...
[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]
Ashley: And actually, most of those people figured out at least a few of the words correctly because again, this sign wave speech, it had been real speech before and it was just degraded.
Ashley: As soon as those people knew that it was a sentence, they were able to describe what some of these words were. And then the third group was actually told what the sentence said, and all of them said that they could hear it.
The distorted message you heard earlier said, “Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo,” Now take a listen.
[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]
Here’s the clean version.
[SFX: Example #1 Clear]
[SFX: Example #1 Distorted]
It’s easier for your brain to hear a message if someone else primes it, like a just did.
So, if priming is a thing, maybe backwards messages have the ability to influence our thinking? Well, as it turns out accidental and intentional backwards messages have no control over our brains.
Ashley: People have done studies on this. They've actually taken backward audio that is real and played it for people and then they've given them a test that should elicit some sort of recognition if a seed was planted for a particular word or something that was played backward, and it just doesn't work. People who hear backward messages have no idea what those things are saying and it doesn't communicate any subliminal message to anybody.
Backwards messages in songs can’t hypnotize us into bad behavior. But they can make us laugh. Like this backmasked thought on the B-52’s “Detour Through Your Mind.”
[music clip: Reversed “Detour Through Your Mind” by the B-52’s “I buried my parakeet in the backyard. Oh no, you're playing the record backwards. Watch out, you might ruin your needle.”]
Backmasking can also be used artistically, like in Missy Elliot’s “Work It.”
[music clip: “Work It” by Missy Elliot]
...and here’s that same section reversed.
[music clip: “Work It” by Missy Elliot reversed]
Many backmasked messages are comments on the Satanic Panic of the 70s and 80s. Electric Light Orchestra played to their evil reputation by adding backmasking to their song “Fire On High.” This was in response to accusations of hiding satanic messages in previous releases. Here is the song in reverse...
[music clip: Reversed “Fire On High” by Electronic Light Orchestra “The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!”]
You might think the Judas Priest verdict was the reason backmasking outrage ended. But, actually, it was technology.
Ashley: The whole Satanism scare in backward music kind of died down when CDs became more popular, because you can't really play CDs backwards, so people weren't as worried about it anymore.
For a couple decades, we didn’t hear many backmasked messages at all, intentional or otherwise. But, now it’s starting to come back… thanks to the internet.
Ashley: It's kind of ramping back up now that there's so much digital music software where you can actually play things backward again.
[music clip: Twenty One Pilots “Nico and the Niners”]
More recently, here’s a track by Twenty One Pilot’s called“Nico and the Niners,” and they put backmasking in the intro. Here's a snippet of what it sounds like when played forward.
[music clip: Twenty One Pilots “Nico and the Niners” played forward]
And here it is reversed. The poetic message says, “We are banditos [music clip]. You will leave Dema and head true east [music clip]. We denounce Vialism [music clip].”
[music clip: Reversed “Nico and the Niners” by Twenty One Pilots]
And of course with intentional backmasking comes the unintentional. This time it’s Lady Gaga praising the devil in the backwards version of “Paparazzi.” The internet has revealed this message, “Evil save us! These stars above, above... we model it on the arts of Lucifer.”
[music clip: Reversed “Paparazzi” by Lady Gaga]
[music in: “Hangtime” by Fuzzz from 00:00]
Ashley: It wouldn't be this big of a deal if music wasn't so integral to our culture and the way we interact with each other and the way we kind of process our feelings and our thoughts about the world. The idea that someone is putting in secret messages to hijack the way that we interact with our music is so scary because it's so important to us.
The facts say the Satanic Panic over backmasking was much ado about nothing. The devil-worshipping messages were unintentional and ineffective. I mean, how many people do you know that listen to Led Zeppelin or Judas Priest now actively warship the devil all the time. It was really only the rise of CDs that stopped the backmasking outrage.
But with that in mind, now that I think about it, has anyone ever really thoroughly gone through all of the songs over the past 20 years of digital music… at least just to check for backward messages? We have a lot to sort through. Maybe all of the backward messages we haven’t found yet have been controlling our every thought and feeling.
[incomprehensible gibberish]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.
This episode was written and produced by James Introcaso...and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, and Nick Spradlin.
Thanks to Bryan Gardiner and Ashley Hamer. Ashley is the managing editor of Curiosity.com and the co-host of the award-winning Curiosity Daily Podcast, which comes out every weekday. She also plays saxophone with the band Fuzzz. That’s F-U-Z-Z-Z if you want to find them on spotify. You’re listening to their song “Hangtime” right now.
Finally, I want you to go find backmasked messages in popular songs and send it to me. Find a track, play it backwards, and tweet what you hear @20korg on Twitter. If it’s funny and relatively clean, I’ll retweet it. Let’s start a panic.
.gninetsil rof sknahT
[incomprehensible gibberish]
[music out]
