Play the Record Backwards, Part 1

Rusty Needles Record Club. Today's episode is going to be something of a crossover episode because we're gonna be talking about Stuff to Blow your Mind type stuff, but this one is going to veer directly into vinyl record territory for I think a large, a large portion of the episode, and especially when you get into that area, I'm I'm really gonna have to defer to you, seth uh, being the master of records that you are, and with myself being someone who was told from an early age not

to touch records and being an obedient child, I obeyed everyone on that and I have virtually not touched any vinyl my entire life, because that's what grown ups are supposed to do. You know, it's not actually a bad rule to make for children, because you know they are very delicate and um not not only um do I manufacture vinyl on my own, which is has taught me

a lot about it. But also, um, I run a record label, so I've had it pressed at at vinyl factories, and and I'm a big vinyl collector on my own, and even me, I'm I'm very familiar with what you should and shouldn't touch. Basically only touched the rim and the label never touched the grooves. Even I just because I'm a human being, I'll be clumsy and drop something You'll like scratch against an edge and like, well, that's ruined forever, you know, So I can't imagine entrusting that

to a child, you know. Uh, That's why children's records are always just scratched into oblivion. So so you know, I I understand, and I also understand why even adults have are hesitance to to to jump into that world.

But I also see the attraction of it obviously. I mean, in a weird house, cinema episodes are always pointing out which movies score has been re released in some sort of strange ultra rare vinyl release, and and it's often beautiful for just from a packaging standpoint, but also when you get down to the details of the record pressing, Like I see the appeal of it. So it's not for for lack of of occasionally thinking, hey I could,

I could start getting into vinyl. But but yeah, just from from an early age I was I was told shouldn't touch that, and I agree. I mean, it's it's wonderful for forcing yourself to be actually involved in what you're consuming musically. That's my favorite part about vinyl. Sure, the sound quality is better, There's there's no getting around that.

It is better. But uh, in addition to that, I love that I need to put the record on the little turntable, I need to turn on my stereo, gotta put the needle in the groove, I need to wait fifteen to thirty minutes, flip it over, put put it back on the other side. You know, like like I have an active interest in what I'm listening to, and therefore it makes me appreciate it more. It's just like eating sunflower seeds, you know. Cracking open the shells is

half the fun, you know. Okay, so you give that tactile experience with it. It's not just a passive series of zeros and ones being pre chosen by an algorithm. I chose this record, I'm putting it on. I'm making these noises happen in my own small contribution way. So in this episode, we're going to be talking in general about things hidden in music. Uh, you might think of them as easter eggs, um or any other number of

terms you might use hidden messages if you'd rather. And we'll also be talking about accusations and panics associated with some of these techniques, the psychology involved, and specific examples from music history. And as we explain these various record based techniques, I will give some real world examples of them that you can find in your local record store and that hey, I think you should listen to, because I think every example I give is something that I'm like, Yes,

I recommend this, go check out out excellent. Yeah. And some of these examples are gonna come up are things that were mentioned in papers I'll be citing, but they're obviously ones in many cases you are very familiar with,

and you can perhaps give a little more background on. Right, all right, So the first stop is going to take us back before musical recording was possible, or at least to a time when the main way to record music was at least via media, was to put it on paper was to write down the music, and even then a certain amount of of musical encoding is possible. So

we have to be reminded that music is information. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that hidden information can be present in music in ways that predate analog or digital media. Not even getting into what's possible with language itself, because obviously, uh, you know, any given songs, lyrics in any given language, there's gonna be a enough complexity there that you can hide things that you can you can sort of get across points, uh, subliminate lee, you can

use metaphors. I mean, all the weapons of language are at your disposal if you at all know how to use them when you're crafting lyrics and uh. But but beyond that, we can certainly look at examples of musical cryptograms, because basically musical symbols and musical notes can and have been used in substitution ciphers. And we've talked about substitution ciphers on past episodes of Stuff to blow your mind.

When musical theorists in the West began to assign letter names to notes, steering I believe the ninth century, see it also became possible to turn things around. Uh though it wasn't until I believe the Romantic period and beyond that that this was really explored. So you might be wondering, Okay, what are you talking about here with the obviously we have notes, we haven't play an A play a B natural, etcetera.

And this is where we see a great example of this, and this is the one that I mentioned a number of you're familiar with, um the famed Baroque composer Johan Sebastian Bach, who through seventeen fifty would employ what we call the Bach motif. So that's a B flat and a A c and then a B natural. Now you might say, well, well that's a B A C B that what that's that's meaningless? Well, in German a B flat is B and a B natural is H, thus

spelling out Bach clever. Maybe maybe once it's been explained, maybe a little too obvious, but but yeah, there it's an example where he decided to using the system in place to to to label these different sounds, to then turn it around and write is no own name in the music itself. And there are numerous other examples of this from other composers you know, I've actually looked this up before because it is it's a fun idea to

communicate with the sounds of notes. In fact, I remember there was a gosh, I believe it was a scene in the Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia where they're on like a game show and these are like what these are things you'll bring to a picnic and they'll just play notes and they'll like spell out the words, so like e G G. I'll bring an egg that kind of thing, you know, like it's it's it's something you can do and it's fun, it's puzzle e it's it's good times. So I've looked this up in the past.

There are approximately, especially if you include the h as as a part of it, around two hundred words that you can spell using just musical notes, so you know, things like cabbage head. You know, like these things, these things are possible, they're they're a part of that language. So I think it would be difficult, but I bet you could form a message, you could form sentences, and

you know, we'll talk more about more examples right now. Yeah, yeah, I mean, because you're essentially talking about music obsessed individuals, total music nerds in different ages just eventually getting in there and just experimenting with what they could do. Be it something that was about creating new sound, elevating the art, etcetera, or just having a laugh, and that's those those two ideas seemed to run throughout the history of of this

kind of hidden messages in music activity. They are also older examples of musical cryptograms, including the work of Renaissance musician Joaquin d. Prey lived fourteen fifty five through fifteen twenty one. He was a French Flemish composer and he composed a particular work this is Missa Hercules du Ferrari. It was for the Duke of Ferrara, and the music is derived from the musical letters in the duke's name. A musical cryptogram that was later known is the saghetto cavato.

Another example, American occultist Paul Foster Case would create a cryptogram in the twentieth century that made use of esoteric symbols and concepts, and if I understand what I was reading on it correctly, it used occult sim oles Hebrew and Latin to translate a word into notes. Though the

usage here would be more ceremonial than anything. Um, but but one of one of one of several examples will be touching on that it that either is within the realm of the occult or we'll touch on examples later that are more in the area of sort of like faux occultism or accusations of occultism, etcetera. So those are all excellent examples. But let's give our audience one more

that's a bit more modern. Something they can they can go find a record of right now, the nineteen seventy seven album Let There Be Rock by A C d C. They close with a song called a Whole Lot of Rosy, where the primary guitar riff goes A C A D A C A or Akadaca, which is A C d c's nickname in their home country of Australia. Ah, that's impressive. I had no idea about that, huh so Johan Sebastian Bach. Also, the members of A C d C all all the same brain when it comes to coding the songs. Here, yes,

shoulder to shoulder. So there's just there's just a few brief examples to demonstrate what is It was possible even before analog and digital media becomes involved in the scenario. But at this point let's move on to some more

analog examples. So the first thing we're gonna look at with actual recorded audio is something that I'm sure many, if not most, of you are familiar with at this point, either by virtue of various panics over popular music, especially satanic panic, and it's um reverberations through media from everything you know, from horror movies to to supernatural television shows and so forth. But also it impacts actual record and actual recording practice, an actual production practice, a technique known

as back masking. So before we get into any actual examples of back masking or allegations of back masking, and this is where it gets, it gets very weird because it seems like on the surface you would think either you're doing it or you're not doing it. And if you're doing it, truly it's it's provable, but I guess a little more ambiguous than that. So in simple terms, this is reversing audio, especially recordings of human speech, playing it backwards in a recording. In many cases you know

you know it when you hear it. Basic backwards speech, which is also sometimes utilized in media for like alien words or arcane spells and so forth. A lot of times it's used for creepy effects, and I think we all we you know what, when you hear it, you can hear this this sound effect, and it's it's people

speaking backwards. Um, that's what it is. It's almost unfortunate that we're also familiar with it at this point because back in the old days, before you know, before we all walked around with computers in our pockets and we all have the ability to record ourselves whenever we wanted, it must have truly sounded foreign. You know, it's it's here audio played backwards, and it's been like, wow, what is that. I've ever heard any creature make that noise before?

And now when we hear it, we just go, oh, that's that's reverse audio. We know what it sounds like, you know, we know, we know the hallmarks of it. Yeah, And I guess with with actual reverse audio, like one of two things happens. It just sounds weird and cool. That sounds like dark magic and so forth, And I think that's especially nowadays. That's how most of us hear it. But also the brain can't help but lean into it, and sometimes try and hear things in it. Uh, And

that gets into a whole other area. Now, the other side of the equation we mentioned allegations um of of of back masking, erroneous back masking, arguments that, especially um dangerous seeming rock bands of previous decades, the idea that they were actually back back masking in a way so that what sounds like just normal lyrics can be reversed and have a totally different meaning, usually one that is

satanic or sometimes not. There's a great episode of The Simpsons where a joke is made that Paul McCartney uh snuck in a recipe for lentil soup into Maybe I'm Amazed. We have to play it backwards to hear it. And here's actually the really fun part. Over the closing credits of that episode of The Simpsons, they do play maybe I'm amazed. This is actually a famous episode. This is the one where at least becomes a vegetarians this episode.

That's a great episode. Yeah, and um so uh in that episode they do play maybe I'm Amazed over the closing credits. And if you actually record the closing credits audio and reverse it, they really did insert a recipe for lentil soup into that song. It's wonderful. Wow. I had no idea, not in the real song, only in the Simpsons episode. Wow. Yeah. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that this practice goes back pretty much is as long as we've had the ability to record and play back speech.

In fact, I was reading, you know, there's a book titled Language, Myths, Mysteries, and Magic from Any fourteen, and there's an article in there on backmasking by Karen stoles Now, and the author points out that this actually goes all the way back to Thomas Edison around eighteen seventy seven, as the noted American inventor and businessman would would experiment with playing music backwards I think, notably a whistled version of Yankee Doodle Dandy um, and this would have been

used via um tinfoil phonograph recordings. He observed that music quote is still melodious in many cases, and some of the strains are sweet and novel, but altogether different from the song reproduced in the right way. And uh, I think we're I think this is a realization that certainly someone like Thomas Edison was in a position to uh, acknowledge and admire back then, and then there's kind of been a wave of it throughout audio history and certainly nowadays.

I've never really looked at this before, but if you go on like YouTube, you'll find so many examples of people taking music and reversing like whole albums just to play it backwards and see what happens. Uh. Sometimes they have a specific thing they're going for, maybe there after something in the lyrics, or it's one of the cases that will be touching on later on in this episode. But other times, especially with I saw the number of like ambient albums, people just want to experience the album

they love, both both the forwards and backwards. I've got another little recommendation to throw in here. Okay, So there is a wonderful musician and his name, his real name is Dave Portner, but he goes by A V taar A V tear is most famously from the band Animal Collective, but he has a wonderful solo career as well. Uh. There was a time when he was married to one of the members of the band Moom and her name was Krea Breckon. Okay, so they released while they were

married a collaborative album together called Pull Hair Rubbi. All right, now, Um, when this album first leaked back in the days when like leaking was a big issue. Uh, folks would listen to and they were like, oh, this is a bad leak. It sounds like the entire album is played backwards. Someone let me know when you get a real version of the leak. Well, A V. Tare himself came onto these boards and was like, no, no, that's that's the real version.

When he and his wife had finished recording their album, they decided, you know, the entire album sounds better if you play it backwards. So what became a pretty straightforward folk album became a pretty foreign sounding backwards album. And it's it's wonderful. It's called Pull Hair Rubb. I. I

highly recommend it, and um, it sounds almost instrumental. It sounds very foreign, and it sounds very strange because once they did reverse it initially and they decided, yes, this whole album just will be backwards versions of every single song. Then they did start leaning into that. Then they made special decisions that really highlighted those choices, and it worked out really well. Genuinely, it's a wonderful album. I think people should listen to it on a very I guess

kind of simple level. It reminds me a lot of what's going on with AI and creativity nowadays, be it with text or visuals, where you have a level of human uh creativity that's going into the machine, it's getting spat out in some form, and then there's going to be a certain amount of tweaking, either after tweaking to the resulting material, or then going back and saying, Okay, now I see what the technology does to what I

started with. What can I do to optimally, um change the results and make it even more in line with

what I'm trying to create. I think this has been something UM that's an element of creativity that people have used forever, which is just taking some of the decisions out of the hands of the creator to help influence something else, whether it be like those um you know those like cut up practices where you're trying to write lyrics, so you write little words, put them in a hat and pull them out one by one, or um you know those famous Brian Eno cards where there's like difference

like prompts written on each card that you pull out, and that's supposed to help you with your production process. Like you know, there's there's lots of examples of this, and yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think AI and intentional reversing just takes a few of those decisions out of the hands of the artist. Now Stalls

Now also shares an another example from Edison. Edison and his colleagues were apparently also fond of taking recordings of someone saying mad dog and playing it backwards so that it sounded like God damn. And this was this was not any kind of early satanic record recording. This was apparently just pure novelty. They just observed that this was

the case and found it amusing. But it touches on something that will will keep coming back to the idea that sometimes when you take spoken language and you reverse it, it it can sound like other words in that language, um and yeah. And then there's a lot of psychological layering to put on top of that, but we'll get to that than now. Eventually, real to real tapes came along. This would have been the nineteen thirties, and it became

increasingly easy for audio lovers to experiment with the medium. So, for instance, French composer Pierre Schaefer lived experimented with tape looping, sampling, and back masking, and the use of backmasking would then increase among avant garde musicians during the nineteen fifties, according to stas Now, and and certainly I think a lot of you out there can can think of various um recording artists who use some of these tools, tape loops especially.

There are a lot of ambient um recording artists that I can think of that that make use of this. But you know, it comes down to just manipulating the recorded data at heart. Now, in the history of backmasking, it's impossible to talk about all this without touching on the Beatles. And it's it's not just because of the Beatles are are popular and uh and are an easy uh band of source for all this like that they were.

They really were the ones that are credited with sort of bringing back masking into the main stream, both for for good and kind of also for uh for bad, for the you know, leaning into the whole panic area so um. To be clear, though, all major and serious accounts, which which stalls Now discusses in their paper, seemed to to to to drive on the Beatles engaged in backmasking purely for novelty's sake. Um this entails large. I think the main examples here three tracks off of the legendary

nine six album Revolver. That would be I'm Only Sleeping Tomorrow Never Knows, but then also the single Rain, which wasn't on that album but came out of the same recordings. So specifically on these I'm Only Sleeping you have a back masked lead guitar part by George Harrison. So George Harrison played it one way. When they were tinkering around if You're going out, you know, how they were putting all this together, they said, hey, we like it better

in reverse. Let's use it that way. It helps create this kind of dream like, uh, you know, psychedelic sound. Yeah, I'm sure just novelty variety, and probably just purely aesthetics. It's just what dictated these decisions for them. I mean, and sure maybe maybe part of it was like, hey, it'll be funny if people try to reverse these things because they sound backwards, but I bet that wasn't really

the primary thoughts. I'm sure aesthetics were the first and foremost decision maker there yeah, I've seen it mentioned that the John Lennon and producer George Martin both kind of took credit for the discovery, but both in in kind of casual ways, like I think George Martin was more along that it was more along the lines of like, yeah, we were experimenting and this sounded good, and John Lennon was more more likely to say, well, I was really high at the time and I kind of discovered it

either way, though, Yeah, Tomorrow Never Knows also has backwards guitar on it, and then Rain stands out a little bit because it features backward vocals. So these are popular and I guess somewhat obvious examples of back masking in the biggest band in the world. And so of course this leads to greater scrutiny, great greater awareness of the technique. Um. And this is going to mean that that later on people were looking at subsequent Beatles albums and saying, well,

I wonder, what's what's farwards, what back what's backwards? Are they using this again? Um? And this ends up this ends up leading to a lot of speculation from some of the more I guess, you know, conspiracy minded fans about what maybe hidden in subsequent albums those stalls Now writes in their paper quote, there were no hidden messages

until the fans and fanatics went looking for them. And so from here we begin to veer into this area of of accusations of back masking and getting into urban legends about songs like Revolution nine off of White album. If this is something I wasn't super familiar with, but there's a voice saying number nine, number nine, number nine, and the legend goes that if you if you reverse that, you hear turn me on dead Man, and um, you can.

You can find examples of this on I think just the Wikipedia page for the Wide album or for Revolution number nine, and you can hear it. I was listening to it just the other day, and I have to say I did not find it particularly convincing. I feel like you really have to want to hear turn Me on Dead Man. And then you get into that area where it's like, if this is the hidden message, why

is the hidden message? Like so like clunky? Yeah, but you I think you can say that about um, something that I think you're coming to, which is all of the Paul Is Dead clues that are out there. Uh, this was taken as one of those as a Oh, this is just an indicator if folks don't know. There's a a long held rumor slash conspiracy theory that is clearly very untrue, but people just like to talk about it that Paul died in a car crash early on in the Beatles career and then he was replaced by

a Paul look alike at one point. Um, it's obviously very untrue, but there are many examples that conspiracy theorists like to talk about, like, um, oh gosh, here here's one. For example, if you look at the cover of Abbey Road picture in your mind, you have the four Beatles walking across the road. Uh, They're all dressed in kind of interesting clothing, very distinct from one another. Um here, I'm going off top my head, but I think I

can do this all the way. At the back, you have George Harrison, who is dressed kind of like a working man, kind of like working man's clothes, denim, nothing fancy. In front of that, you have Ringo who's wearing like kind of a fancier suit and tie. Okay. In front of that you have Paul, also dressed, you know, pretty casually and I think he's not wearing shoes, all right, And then in front of him you have John Lennon who is dressed all in white with long flowing hair, etcetera, etcetera.

So the message you were supposed to receive from that is that John Lennon was God and he was taking home the dead body of Paul McCartney. He wasn't wearing shoes because something to do with like being buried without your shoes on. It was. It was something that's one referenced. Ringo represented like the priest who was like burying and giving the eulogy, and George Harrison was representing the grave digger, the man actually burying Paul, and it's like, yeah, I

guess you know, like that's that's quite a stretch. There's a lot of other things too, Like if you hold a mirror up to the bass drum on the cover of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it allegedly like gives you the date that Paul died. And like if you look at like the pictures on the cover of Let It Be, I think Paul's is the only one with like a red background and everyone else's his white or something like that, like there's all these little things

and they're all meaningless. But this, this was another one that turned me on dead Man. It's I don't know, I don't know why someone could put some so much stock in this, but I suppose it's fun, you know,

just to look for clues and and and hints and stuff. Yeah, I mean, we have to remember this is in the wake of of Beatlemania, and we could think of it as like a heretical strain of Beatlemania that began to attach itself to these various cryptic details in either the uh you know that the advanced production design of the music, or the advanced record design, you know, illustration work and graphic design on the albums. There's plenty to sort of latch onto in both of these, and um, some of

one of those things. I guess you look at a lot of conspiracy thinking some of this may have began for fun, it's just as an amusement, but then it can kind of take on an energy of its own, and you begin to wonder to what extent or people truly buying into this idea that Paul is dead and has been replaced by a look alike and Obviously, the most rational thing you would do if you were perpetrating this kind of conspiracy was leave a lot of clues

for it in your subsequent album output. Absolutely so. Anyway, Paul McCartney was not dead then and as of this recording still alive. Actually now, it is worth noting that A Day in the Life off of Sergeant Pepper's Only Hearts Club Band, which will come back to again, that it does contain some sounds that are just for dogs though. There there's also the allegation that a reverse section at the end of the song can be reversed into something crude. But according to to to Martin, this is all just

gibberish reverse. They just recorded a lot of gibberish and then reversed it. I mean, I mean, you could hear nearly anything in anything. I remember personally. I had a copy of um Crosby Stills in Nash Deja Vu, and when I was younger, I played the title track backwards because why not, you know, I had a record player, why not play it backwards? And there was a section where I swore, my little teenage brain, I swore that

they said you cannot hide hide amongst them. Okay, So I was hanging out a friend of mine's house and I heard her her I think it was her stepfather, was in the other room playing this record out loud, and I was like, oh my gosh, I know a hidden message in this record that if you if you play it backwards, that it says you cannot hide, hide amongst them. And she's like, oh, go tell him, go

tell them, Like okay, this is gonna be great. So I go to this adults little teenage boy, like, you know, if you play this song backwards, you can hear, you can hear hidden messages, you can hear you cannot hide, hide amongst them. And he goes. He stares me for a while cox's head. He's like, you smoke a lot of pot, do you No, I'm just a music lover. I love plagued my records backwards, And yeah, didn't. Didn't. I didn't get the reaction I was hoping for, which

was all in praise and a standing ovation. But oh well, this is a great time for me to ask this though, because I guess this is some thing that should be obvious to to people who use record players. But I didn't even think about this. But every every record player gives you the ability to play both forward and backwards. Is that correct? Almost? Almost? Um, some of them do it deliberately, Like there are record players that I own that literally have a switch that you can go from

forwards to backwards. And that's if you have a quote unquote like fancy record player, that button will be there. And that's that's a very useful thing to have, especially we're trying to like cue up an exact moment in a song, that kind of thing. So yeah, so that that that is a feature that many record players have a literal reverse button, but on the less expensive ones. And this is the way I used to do when

I was younger. You would turn off the belt that that that that drives the actual turning of the record, and you would but you would leave the speaker on and you would manually move your hand backwards pushing the record in reverse, which makes it sound even creepier because it's not even like, you know, at like a regular pace. It's got like this like human lurch too. It's you know. So, but but I also know that there are record players that just will not go and reverse no matter if

you push them, you'll just end up breaking them. So yeah, there's there's different kinds, but some actually just have a button that plays it in reverse. Interesting, Well, this is this is all telling because it does sound, from what you're saying, like just the basic vinyl record scenario would sort of put the tools in the average music fans hands to sort of go in and investigate for themselves, um and uh and and find things potentially or confirm

things that they heard they might find. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So again, by most accounts, backmasking by the Beatles was generally more about novelty and dumb jokes, but that doesn't mean that occult backmasking didn't take place. According to Jonathan Winel, Darryl Griffith's, and Stewart Cunningham in Easter Eggs, Hidden Tracks and Messages and Musical Mediums, occultist Alistair Crowley encourage practitioners

to engage backwards thinking by listening who recordings backwards. And while I think this sounds kind of silly, this notion and the ripples of this notion certainly influenced the eventual place of backtracking in Satanic panic Um Satanic panic. Of course, this is something that we've touched on the show before.

This was a moral panic, mostly in the United States and then also in um in the UK and parts of Europe during the eighties and nineties, though it's reverberations in subsequent years and subsequent decades can be found in different parts of the world and also in different sort

of communities and certainly faith communities as well. Basically just whips everyone into a frenzy over the idea that something that had never really existed in the world, that is, the organized worship of Satan, was in engaging in covert means of corrupting the youth of the world, as well as ritually torturing and murdering children. So, um, yeah, there's much more one can say about Satanic pan uh in its awfulness, but and and and also the like the

real cost of it to to actual human beings. There's also a lot to be said into how it ends up impacting media, how it impacts music and horror and so forth. Um, But back masking comes into play as a part of all of this as well, because you had allegations that scary metal bands and even bands that we might not think of today as being that scary, we're using backmasking to corrupt listeners with incantations of devil, magic, drugs,

and more. Which this era is so baffling to me because I suppose, if you're the kind of person that wants to believe in this organized worship of Satan that's happening right under your nose, any of your neighbors could be a Satan worshiper. I suppose you're also the same same kind of person that's going to believe that a backwards incantation can do something have some effects in the

real world. So I don't know, Like, like, I just hope for the practice cold minds of most people to go, wait, there's a backwards spell on this, Oh well, good things spells don't work, so who cares? You know? Yeah, it ultimately raises a bunch of ridiculous questions when you when you start analyzing it with a logical mind. But and then some of them too. It just it just made

absolutely no sense. It makes no sense to me. For example, it was alleged at one point that A. C. D. C's Highway to Hell contained back masked lyrics, and when asked about this, Anger's Young refuted it by saying, hey, well, there's nothing subliminal about the the actual lyrics to the song. Part of the lyrics are hey, Satan paying my dues playing in a rocking band? Like what if? Like what

why do you need to also hide the Satanism? If you're basically saying praise Satan right there in the lyrics, I don't get it. And there were these were but these were real accusations with potentially real consequences for bands and record companies at the time. For instance, one accusation that picked up steam among evangelicals, especially at the time. And this is one that I imagine a lot of

you have heard, and there are examples of this. You can pull up on Wikipedia for the entry for this song. But led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven classic rock song, like it's it's a song that, uh, I think it is great, but I couldn't tell you because I've heard it too many times on the radio. So it's it's not my favorite led Zeppelin song because I've just heard it too many times. It would not be like in the top ten for me. And it contains it does contain some

actual lyrics. That's that go as follows. If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed. Now I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that those are just part of the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven. And the accusation is that if you play this backwards, then you hear the words here's to my sweet Satan, the one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He'll give you, He'll give you six six six. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer sad.

Satan way too elaborate for back basket, not a chance. I mean I after I read this, I listened to the example of it, and I mean it is it is creepy to hear because you are hearing reverse language. You are hearing uh, you are hearing something that sounds like Satan. But then on the other hand, it's so ridiculous sounding, like what does this even mean? Like if I were to take this at face value, why what is the tool shed doing for me in this scenario?

Like nothing in this is is is really all that creepy compared to any actual Satanic lyrics, So really there are there are plenty of examples in led Zeppelin's lyrics that are, on the face more shocking than what we have right here in the alleged back masking. I mean, I mean, and also I think, um, certain words just when they get reversed automatically kind of sound creepy. Like. For example, I remember Yoko on No got accused of this.

She had a song called kiss, Kiss, Kiss, and of course when you play kiss kiss kiss backwards, it's six six six for sure. And um, you know I I yeah, I think certain words just sound easily like other words backwards. But I don't believe for a moment that this many words could sound good forwards and backwards, not for a second. Yeah, I mean, also the weird exercise you'd have to go through to get to this point. Um. I think the other important thing is like when you when you reverse lyrics,

when you reverse words, you're gonna get other sounds. But those sounds are not going to have real context until you give them contexts and you you say like, well, yeah, that that sound, that that kind of six six six sound, it's gonna sound like like six six six, uh, that

sort of thing. Yeah, it's a real Laurel or Yanny situation. Yeah, I think the other telling thing about this, but first of all, it's an accusation that Robert Plant and their audio engineer at the time refuted um and and unlike with the Beatles, it doesn't seem like the band or those involved in producing the tracks really found this technique

all that interesting. And I don't know this is maybe just me, but I feel like if they had actually done this on purpose, It's one thing to cover it up during the the initial period of satanic panic during the you know, certainly in the eighties and even nineties, But it seems like if this, if they had actually backmasked some content here and gone to some links to put some satanic silliness in here, it would have come out right like how great are are the surviving members

of led Zeppelin going to really be at keeping secrets like this? I mean, um, I think when these things happened, Like another example of this that was famous at the time was the supposed sinking of playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz, and I gave you this whole experience with the two lined up perfectly, and everyone in Pink Floyd is like, how would we do that? You know, like the we were

just like in a studio. Everything's analog, like we didn't have like, you know, no, of course not, of course we couldn't have done that, you know, yeah, or like can you imagine that the reality where they're like, yes, this is actually how we make all of our albums. We we pick a classic movie, we play it, and we just match things up with what's happening on the screen. Um. I mean that could be somebody's artistic um technique, but yeah, it's just those connections are not made by the creator.

Those connections are made by on your end when you combine two things and look for meaning between those two things, which can be fun, but don't believe it, you know, like fun is fun as long as you don't believe this nonsense. Yeah, enjoy it, but don't ruin by going

too far into rank. So I mentioned that there were potential real consequences for all this, Like it got to the point where there were actually some lawmakers that were interested in demanding backtracking warnings on our albums so that consumers would could be aware that there might be hidden messages, which is ridiculous to imagine, like may contain hidden messages

that may contained electric guitar. And this is another thing getting back to I mentioned earlier, how when you have the full tools of language at your disposal, there's so many things you can do to manipulate people, to um, to hide your message, to say something kind of cheeky so that some people get it but others don't. There's plenty of stuff you can do with UM with language that hasn't been reversed, and great lyricists are going to

be able to use those tools. Like doing this whole backtracking technique is just such a crude and ineffective way of hiding your secret message if you actually have a secret message you want to get out there, and especially too if you want to keep it a secret for most people. Like like, for example, UM, let's say you're trying to send a secret message on a sheet of paper and you just write each of the letters backwards, so you have to hold it up and look at

it in the mirror to read the best. Yeah, someone's going to figure it out. Like now, let let's let's say you take the first letter of each word in your lyrics and it spells a new secret message. Hey, that's that's going to be actually harder to decipher, you know, So it's it's not even a very good secret message. Yeah, I mean it. We mentioned Don McClain recently on the show when we discussed the flight of Dragons, like American Pie has plenty of cryptic content within it and um

and and that is achieved without reversing anything. Right. So anyway, getting back to this idea that like, why why would you need a label? Right, why would there need to be a warning saying my contained secret messages because if

it's backwards, I can't understand it. Right. Well, that's where we get into these claims, and I think these are this is this is pretty much been refuted as pseudoscience at this point, but this idea that backmasked messages can be understood subconsciously even if you're not consciously understanding them. So one of the main prop onent's of the power of reverse speech is an individual by the name of David John Oates. And this is a guy that's appeared

on the likes of Coast to Coast. Uh. This is the you know, the radio station radio show rather that's popular and known for its various treatment of UFOs and

so forth. You know a lot of what I guess you've described the sort of fringe ideas and Oates would discuss this, this notion that normal speech contains a smaller percentage of backward speech that I'm not sure I even understand exactly what the idea here is that maybe it kind of cuts to the chase a bit that the thing that you're sort of trying to say through with forward facing speech, you're also saying, at least in a

simplistic form, through the reverse of the speech. There is an example that is sometimes used to support this, and it's apparently if you take Neil Armstrong nine and saying small step for man, of course during the lunar landing, if you were to reverse that, uh, it sounds something like manual spacewalk. And um, this one I thought sounded pretty pretty silly to me. I mean, what does that even mean? Why? What? What? What's my take home from

that you have? If if this is some sort of meaningful content, like I guess it, it would at best mean that the smart things that you say forwards sounds stupid or backwards. It doesn't make any sense if if it at least like predicted the future, it would be helpful, you know, like, um, oh, let's say he said small step for man and then in reverse. It it actually said like, hey, watch out for that rock over there, you're gonna trip over. It's like that would be helpful.

He could use that information, you know, But but no, this, this is this is nothing. This is nonsense. Yeah. So again this has been widely refuted in scientific literature pseudo science, and one of the central arguments is that, okay, with with Oates work and with well not even just Oats work, but just in general, if you're trying to push this idea that that the thing that you're about to hear reversed is going to say something else, it depends heavily

on priming. Uh, you're being you're given an idea of what you were about to hear backwards. And I encountered that time and time again researching for this episode. Like when you go to the the the audio audio examples on the Wikipedia for Stairway to Heaven, it tells you what you're about to hear, what you're gonna hear straightforward, and what you were expected to hear uh in reverse. So you're you're going into a it to it to it looking for that template to line up. But what's

really going on is something called paraidolia. This is the tendency for humans to find meaning in something, be it uh seeing a face in the surface of the moon, secret messages in a reverse song, uh, connections between this album and this movie when this movie is played on mute, that sort of thing. And it's I mean, it's a powerful force. It's it's a it's something that guides a lot of our creativity that we can look at, like

a smear on the wall. We can look at a cloud in the sky and we can we can we can lean into a version of it that's not there. We can make we can apply some sort of logic to it and and create fantasy. And I think that, I mean, that's I feel like, easily the far more sensible way of understanding any kind of sense that seems

to come out of reverse speech. I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that meaningful reverse speech would simply emerge from traditional speech UM, as well as the idea that meaningful information could then be understood by our brain even on like a subliminal level like mad Dog and God damn, sorry to have to curse again, but this is the one of the historical examples. UM. These ideas are maybe

not completely unconnected from each other. Um, but they're also like there's not really a strong meaningful connection either, Like I'm not sure what the argument would be between those two were. And it's funny too because and then the argument is, oh, but only in English, you know, because these words, let's say we say them in French instead, the two words will not be the same two words forward and backwards. You won't you won't be the same

message no matter what it's. It's basically impossible. So so no, you know, it's like when people make arguments about um, oh great predictions followed through like the Mayan calendar or something, It's like, yeah, but they didn't use like leap days like we do you know, like what time zone were they using? Like like like these things don't line up, like like different cultures have different um ways to kind of like uh parcel out our lives, and they don't

match up across culturally. So so you can't just say something is a universal truth. It's just like, well, maybe that only works in English for me. When I have the words written down, and uh, I was looking at a couple of sources on this, you cat a little more depth in it, uh In a R Vokey and J. D. Reid suggested that some information might pass through when you were when you were reversing using reversed audio, but they were also very firm on the matter being misrepresented in

the media. Uh In this in and one of their papers, they write, quote, is there any evidence to warrant assertations that such such messages affect our behavior across a wide variety of tasks? We were unable to find any evidence to support such a claim. Secondarily, we present evidence to suggest that the apparent presence of backward messages in popular music is a function more of active construction on the part of the perceiver than of the existence of the

messages themselves. Right. It was like a raw shack test. Yeah, yeah, And and this I think is extremely telling to at two thousand one study by Kriner, Altis and Voss found that quote no priming effect was found for backwards messages, although there were significant priming for forward messages. The results are not consistent with an effect of reverse speech on

word processing. And I think that's this is really key, because we know that priming works with forward with normal language, that I can say something to you and I can prime you for something and the effects of that priming is measurable through experimentation. So if if if something was to come through via reversed audio through back masking, it would have an effect on priming, and we would be able to measure that. And there's nothing to measure because

it doesn't work. It doesn't do that. Now that being said, there there's still plenty of fun examples of back masking in in music. One that that came up for me and this is another example of the song that I've heard many times, but I did not really think about the back masking in it because I'm just so used to hearing this technique. It's cool, but I don't give it a lot of second thought or even wonder what's

being reversed. But there's a there's a Great Boards of Canada album Geogatti, and there's a track titled you Could Feel the Sky, and there's definitely some back mask audio in there, and it may be reverse. It seems like it's likely a reversal of a clip from I think a documentary on paganism that says the God with horns, and I guess this is maybe just kind of a

cheeky nod to backmasking. History. Uh and and some of the you know, the Satanic panic ideas, which of course Boards of Canada would have very much been familiar with. And there's still so many examples too of people going into business for themselves on back masking, playing stuff backwards, sharing it on YouTube and saying, hey, clearly, if you play this Black Sabbath lyric backwards, you hear I want to be like Jesus. Stuff like that. I mean, there's

if you're just going into it purely for fun. Yes, there's probably some some fun and amusing quote unquot discoveries to make there, but just keep in mind that it's just as much meaning as can be applied to spilling some alphabet soup on the floor and seeing how many words are spelled outs you know exactly. That can be fun, but there's no meeting there. I thought it was put really well in a piece and salon written by Eric Davis. This piece was title what Exactly lyrics within the background

rooves of Stairway to Heaven quote. Soon, backmasking became the Satanic panic du jour, giving paranoid Christians technological proof that rock bands like Queen Kiss and Sticks. And then there's an exclamation point in partheses did indeed play the devil's music.

While most people Christian or otherwise found all this rather silly, these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become a subliminal master of puppets, fears that would themselves come to inspire some nineteen eighties metal and I think this this one might have also been the paper to point out that you also get these ridiculous images and ridiculous footage of of of the some of the provocateurs of Satanic panic, some of the the individuals that

were making these accusations messing around with record players and playing stuff backwards and just really gazing hard and deep and trying to find evidence of Satan in the reversed audio. Hey, you know, everyone needs a hobby. I'm glad they're having fun. Good for them. How about you, sef, Do you have any any favorite examples of bat masking? You know, yeah,

oh yeah, yeah. I have one that I absolutely love, not only because I think it's a fun example of, you know, kind of how this can influence the songs writing and kind of create a finished product, but also just because I think it's a lovely song off of a wonderful album by one of my favorite bands. Here's an example. Uh, this is off of radio Heads two thousand and one album Amnesiac. There's a very alien sounding

song called like Spinning Plates. It sounds so odd because it originally started off as a song called I Will, which is very funny because radio had eventually actually finished that song and released it on a later album. But enough about that. They were trying to record this song during this recording session called I Will, and they just

couldn't get it to work. They were just messing around with it, doing whatever, and at one point they decided to play it backwards and they're like, yeah, that's it. That's that's the album I want to hear. So they had this, uh, this instrumental for this song backwards, and the like, this is good, this is good, and so so Tomy York, the lead singer. He created a new vocal melody to go over it. But when you when you played the forward vocal melody over the backwards song,

it just didn't quite line up. It just didn't sound right. They didn't mesh together. So what he decided to do instead was to phonetically take the words he wanted to say, reverse them and then sing it backwards. He was obviously singing forward in real time, but he's singing the backwards result of what he wanted. So when he reversed it, it would sound like forward words. So I'll say that

in a more succinct way. Tom York made up new words that were phonetically the backwards version of his new forward vocals, and then reverse the recording, creating lyrics that sounded forward in the final song but are actually being reversed. A very similar system was used in the TV show Twin Peaks for the character the Man from Another Place a k a. The Arm. He's the guy that's like, you know sometimes my arms been back. You know that that you like will come back in style? That guy

that that's very similar system. Yeah. But but as as we'll point out, just like all this discussion we've been having, that character of the Man from Another Place from Twin Peaks, he always had subtitles because would you really be able to understand what he was saying backwards if there weren't subtitles there. I don't know. That's a that's a great point, and it's a key point. Now. I love Radiohead and

and I love Tom York's um vocals. Tom new York's vocals almost seemed like the perfect vocals to use in an experiment of reverse or because I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I there's certain vocalists whose voices I I think of more as a musical instrument, like a pure instrument, as opposed to a deliverer of actual linguistic information. And I don't mean that as like a slam on them, um, And it doesn't even necessarily mean that I can't understand

what they're saying. I mean sometimes I think of people like um, like Maynard from Tool. You know, It's like I can understand the words he's saying, but I'm not really engaging with what he's saying on a lyrical level. It's more about like the pure sound experience. And I feel like that's that's what I have with Tom York. Well, if you look at like the kind of the hallmarks

of reversed audio and what's really changing. Uh, The big key, the thing that we cannot create with forward sounds and can only be created backwards is when anything percussive occurs, it goes and like a big sound at the beginning and then it trails off very quickly. So when you hear that backwards, especially, think about something like the sound of like a drum being played backwards. It's like which, which is a very iconic backwards sound. I suppose, you know,

I'm the one who edits these episodes. I could just put in a reverse sound there, but no, no, no, I like making with my mouth instead. But but yeah, I think that's a big part of it. And Tom York has a very vowel heavy, very floaty, ethereal singing style, a lot lots of oos and os and moaning and kind of like soft sounds. So because of that, forwards and backwards doesn't affect it too much. You know, he's not a percussive, you know, singer, and the percussion is

really what signifies, oh, something's backwards here. So huh, all right, everybody, that's gonna have to be side A and you're gonna have to flip it over for side b Uh. We ended up reaching the point where we're gonna have to cut this one in half, but we'll be back in the next episode. Stuff to blow your mind seth Will and I will continue this discussion and we'll get more into physical media, we're start we're we'll start talking about

essentially enter the labyrinth of Vinyl records. In the meantime, I'll just remind everybody that core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed Monday's we do listener mail. Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or monster effect. On on on Fridays we do Weird how Cinema. That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and

just talk about a weird film. By the time you're listening to this, I think Joe is actually back, so uh, we should be welcoming Joe back on some episodes in the very near future. But we recorded these episodes ahead of time. And as always, thanks to Seth Nicholas Johnson for not only co hosting but of course producing Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if you want to reach out to any of us, if you have feedback on this episode of thoughts about reversed music and so forth,

will you can email us at contact. It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio This is the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.