Sometimes you don’t even need to reverse them to hear the secret messages
ti eveileb ot uoy stnaw nataS
I suspect someone has manipulated the youtube version to make it more “obvious,” kinda like those enhanced photos showing shooters at the grassy knoll.
But at any rate, what does it mean? If it’s a satanic message, what is the message? “Spake the reve”? is that “dream” in French, or did someone misspell “reeve,” in some sort of Chaucer reference, that makes no sense in context (or lack thereof). What’s all that stuff about wimps? How common was the word wimp when “Stairway to Heaven” was written? I don’t think is was very common until the 1980s. “Give you 666”? Isn’t 666 the sign of the beast? are you going to be turned into the beast, and is that at all compatible with the narrative of Revelation?
Yes, I hear words, and a couple of them sound like things such as “sweet Satan,” which, devoid of context is a pro-Satan statement, I guess, but other than that, all the discernible phrases add up to nothing other than a word salad.
If someone is going to the trouble of writing something that makes sense backwards as well as forwards, and the backwards message is the important message, I think that one would make sense, and the forward message would just be strings of phrases that don’t really mean anything. Well, OK, but forward, “Stairway to Heaven” rhymes, and does expound upon some themes, and fits a tune, which is another thing. You’d think that if the backwards lyrics were the “real” message, the tune would sound better backwards. It doesn’t.
The “One Day at a Time” theme was the best laugh I’ve had in a while.
Played backwards, I hear “Buy more Led Zep records.”
Not exactly the sort of inspiring message one would expect to hear from the Prince of Darkness, is it?
And now I cannot listen without hearing about this octopus.
But you played the YouTube clip first, right? So when you played the audio clip on Wikipedia, you had already been “told” by the YouTube clip what you were supposed to hear.
Further, the Wikipedia article states what you’re supposed to hear in the text.
Dr., That was FREAKIN’ AWESOME!! Thanks.
Satan’s Little Toolshed is where all the rakes go. And the hoes.
Back in the 1980s, I was in the military and my barracks roommate was a Pentecostal dude that was really into telling anyone who would listen that rock and roll had all sorts of demonic messages in it.
He had all these cassette tapes of backwards songs, but he also claimed that when played forwards they were full of satanic themes. He had all these songs you guys are referencing, plus a hell of a lot more. He even claimed shit like Air Supply was satanic.
I remember him claiming that Prince was particularly evil because Prince pretended to love Jesus, but was secretly a Satanist. He got all these tapes I mailed to him from some Christian radio station.
We worked on the same shift, and were where often posted on the same two man patrol, so I was around this guy nearly 24/7.
I begged to be moved to another room, but I was stuck with him.
I tried to play along with him and told him that I was afraid he was attracting demons to our room by talking about them all the time.
He assured me that we were protected by Jesus as long as we prayed.
Some joker down the hall started leaving messages on the dry erase board that was on our door, like Pentecost is Pentagram, and all sorts of devil shit.
He flipped out and started praying loud all the time, he drove me nuts.
I finally got my sergeant to pull some strings with the barracks manager and get me in another room.
I was just a kid back then, and was too shy to confront him in an ugly manner. Besides, he could be a nice person sometimes.
Plenty of other people on our shift fucked with him though, and I guess somehow I felt sorry for him.
I’ll never forget how hurt he looked the day I moved to another room.
PS
I never believed any of that backwards masking crap.
Fortunately it was Stairway to Heaven, so the lyrics don’t make any more sense frontwards.
That was very interesting. Thanks.
No, it’s not enhanced from what I can tell. When we were kids, we heard that Stairway was rumored to have Satanic messages played backwards, so I flipped a cassette tape around (I believe I had to actually completely invert it, as in unspool the entire tape and respool it so the inside of the tape was now the outside) to hear it backwards. We picked out two phrases: “Here’s to my sweet Satan” and “There’s no escaping it/him.” (And I’ll go along with the OP in that we didn’t actually know what we were looking for, except some reference to Satan. So we were primed a bit to find the first quote, not so much the second.) But that’s all we could ever hear in the backwards tape. But it’s all like finding patterns in the clouds. None of us actually believed there was actual backwards masking going on or that Satan somehow was worming his way into popular music in such a stupid manner.
I first heard this one years ago and it still cracks me up. It’s so prosaic! Why is Satan in a toolshed? Does he need garden supplies? Was Home Depot no help? And it’s not even a big scary one, if a toolshed can be scary - they specify it’s little one! Maybe that’s why he’s sad. He’s The Lord of Hell and he’s hanging around some English dad’s toolshed with the rusted shovels and the leaky garden hose, tormenting some pimply teenage wankers who just got home from school. It’s not a great advertisement for the dark power of Lucifer, is it? Why would you sell your soul to some sad goat-footed dingus in a little toolshed?
Aaaaaargh. He has come, he has come, the Dark Destroyer stalks the land!!!
What does it matter? If the words are truly Satanic, it invokes a fictional character if spoken? I won’t be surprised if I hear playing Bruno Mars backwards sounds like spells to invoke Voldemort. Fiction can’t hurt you unless someone truly bashes someone else with the bible.
No, there’s no secret messages on Stairway. However, I heard the “Bloody Mary, Come and get me” stuff IS true, and should never be spoken. 
It’s true that many of the alleged secret messages found in backmasks are probably just the result our ability to make sensible patterns out of random gibberish, but backmasking is a very well known recording technique that became popular and widely used once controversy arose about its existence.
Once the practice became known to the record-buying public and people started playing albums backwards to see if their favorite band had any secret messages for them, you can bet that even more bands put them there to sell more albums. The catch is that in order to really sound sensible backwards, it has to sound pretty much like gibberish when played forward so it’s not a case of a perfectly sensible lyric having a hidden dark meaning when played backwards.
I usually hate to cite Wikipedia articles butthis one has some good examples that you can listen to and statements from the artists about how and why they put them there.
Almost every example of popularly believed backward messages mentioned so far in this thread have been denied by the artists and written off as being purely the result of our imaginations, but in the case of The Beatles and Judas Priest (and dozens that haven’t been mentioned here) the legends are actually true and have been acknowledged by the artists.
Once the words have been suggested to you, you can hear the same thing in other recordings, by different artists, of the same song. Just for shits and giggles, I used Audacity to reverse the same segment of “Stairway to Heaven” in recordings by Led Zeppelin, Great White, Pat Boone, and Dread Zeppelin. I heard “Here’s to my Sweet Satan” in all versions, including Pat Boone’s. Of course I was intentionally listening for it, knowing that that was the suggested wording. I don’t believe it was put into any of the versions intentionally, though. I do believe someone imagined what they believed they heard in the original recording and it spread by word of mouth, then became viral with the advent of the Internet. Otherwise, it does just sound like random gibberish.
Much like this post probably sounds.
We really need a “sheepish” smilie.
By the way, I made this into a ring tone on my cell phone. 
What I never understood about the claim that there are backwards messages in music is the supposed purpose of them.
Some say they are there to supposedly influence people on a subconscious level, but they never explain how that works.
Exactly how would the brain be able to recover a backwards message in a song when you are listening to it forwards?
The brain wouldn’t be able to recover the message.
But the people who claim there are harmful messages in music, are relying on you to be mystified by a bogus claim about subliminal messages and the subconscious.
Just how would it matter if there were hidden messages in songs?
I used to argue with my roommate about this. I’d tell him to leave the messages hidden, and everyone would be fine.
For some reason, he was convinced that he had to warn people.