There are a few examples of intentional back-masking, but none that I know of that are overtly satanic.
At the beginning of “Still Life” by Iron Maiden, there’s a backwards recording of their drummer saying “What who said da ting wit t’ree bonts.” One of Hirax’s albums ended with a track that played backwards said something like “Bleah! F— the world! Bleah! Bleah!” Perhaps Slayer’s “Hell Awaits” comes closest with “Join us, join us” being played backwards at the beginning of the song, but all the blatantly satanic stuff in that song doesn’t need to be played backwards. These examples were clearly audible when played normally, almost as if to say “hey! check it out! evil backwards message! play me backwards!,” so I’m not sure if they qualify as being “masked”.
I remember being told by my church that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” repeats the phrase “my sweet Satan, Satan is beautiful” throughout the entire song. Then, when I had access to a cassette player capable of playing the tape backwards, I checked and found nothing but gibberish…except one very specific part (somewhere around the “bustle in your hedgerow” lyric) where I distinctly heard “ngaaaaaa seep-zept,” which sounds close enough to “my sweet Satan” to hear that line if that’s what you wanted to hear. I couldn’t figure out where the second half of that bit came from, though, and it definitely was not repeated anywhere else in the song. Since then, I’ve dismissed any claims of back-masking as paranoid hysteria.
There’s a part in the song that, when played backwards, sounds like “Oooo…Here’s to my sweet Satan.” If you’re looking for it, you should notice it, otherwise it might pass you by. Also, in my backward masking experiments, I heard “There’s no escaping him/it” in “Stairway to Heaven.”
I think anyone who is going to the trouble of listening to records playing backwards is going to find something. I also think it’s a sales pitch for the suckers as well.
Surely, if Satan exists, he and his followers could find a better way to communicate. AND are these examples the best messages we’ve come up with. I believe if I really wanted to deliver a message backwards within a song, I could do better than what I’ve read/heard so far.
But ELO were doing this crap. Practically everything they ever did was riddled with them. And I don’t mean just backwards masking, the whole satanic schtick as well. You have to wonder what Jeff Lynne was on.
Secret Messages was more a case of owning up having been thoroughly rumbled.
Distinctly??? Now I’m only 42, so not as wise as you, but it takes a brain pre-distorted by religious fundamentalists to hear any words in the backwards “number nine.” At least, the people I knew who claimed that was what was being said were fundies. To me, it sounds like unintelligible mumbling, with a rhythm pattern that, after someone suggests it, can be linked to the phrase “turn me on dead man.” But “distinct” it ain’t.
Try reading this quote from Striss for the message hidden within. :eek:
koo…koo…kachoo
Well Isabelle, you get your answer yet? I suppose there are some examples of reverse masking in music. Their reasons seem to vary.
The most apparent intentional examples would be for promoting records sales.
Then again perhaps there are a FEW examples of musicians doing this intentionally “just for the Hell of it.”
Probably the best excuse/reason would be an unitentional or coincidental occurrence found by listeneners with a biased viewpoint. (Folks looking for messages) IMO of course.
I’ve listened to a few of these “Satanic messages” and as far as I’m concerned…nothing to it.
Two of the books from William Poundstone’s Big Secrets series (1983’s Big Secrets, 1986’s Bigger Secrets, and 1993’s Biggest Secrets) each have a chapter on backwards masking. I forget which of the books doesn’t cover backwards masking … I’m thinking Biggest Secrets.
Most of the examples mentioned in this thread are mentioned. Poundstone also offers some laymen-level (if dated) technical information as well.
There are genuine reversals and there are what are sometimes known as chance reversals. A “chance” reversal is an instant in which a sound played backwards sounds like some other sound. Such chance reversals generally require a fair amount of imagination to hear properly.
The “Turn Me on Dead Man” passage in Revolution 9 is an instance of a chance reversal. All the voice was really saying was “Revolution 9”. Possibly John Lennon was aware of what this sounded like in reverse; there is, after all, athentic “back masked” material in the record, as a brief passage from a BBC broadcast of King Lear is included in reverse.
An old friend of mine got the white album when it was knew, and listened to it for the first time in the dark in the basement of his grandparent’s house. He was in junior high at the time, and was smoking marijuana for the first time in his life. For a brief moment he thought the marijuana was causing him to hallucinate.
It is extremely difficult to predict what something will sound like precisely when played backwards. It is a problem of a whole different order from merely figuring out a palindrome. One is not merely reversing the order of sounds, but reversing the individual sounds themselves.
Revolution 9 may be the first prominent instance of such techniques being used in a well-known commercial recording, but it was not the first time it had been used in any commercial recording. I recall hearing once that in the 50s (IIRC) a French recording studio issued an experimental record which included a cut in which a woman sang backwards. That is, she sang a song and it was recorded. Then the recording was played backwards. Then she learned to imitate the sound of her own voice being reversed. Then she sang a recording of the song in reverse. Then this recording was played backwards. The effect was said to be quite eerie; one could understand the words (provided you knew French), but she continually sounded as though she were inhaling rather than exhaling.
While I have never heard the record, I expect too that there were other subtle clues that something was wrong. In something of the same way, there are moments in the films Shane and Bringing Out the Dead in which actors moved backwards and then the film shot of them was played in reverse.
The Judas Priest recording Dream Deceiver is another famous instance of an intentional reversal. An American teenager shot himself to death after an extended drinking binge while the song was playing, and a friend with whom he had made a suicide pact left himself horribly mutilated when a shotgun blast only wounded him. The parents of the surviving boy sued, insisting that the song contained reversals which drove him to want to kill himself. At trial it came out that there was an intentional reversal. It was of the singer saying he liked peppermints.
It’s mentioned in one of the Big Secrets books that this recording method was also used in the TV series Twin Peaks for the voice of “the dwarf” (I put that in quotes because I didn’t watch TP often enough to know whether or not that was the ONLY dwarf).
The aforementioned Poundstone also revealed that They Might Be Giants used the same technique in part of their song “Ana Ng”.
I seem to remember that Twin Peaks did an entire episode using backwards speaking. All the characters spoke nonsense backwards, walked backwards, etc. Then it was shown backwards to make sense, but in a very strange way.
As far as backward tape loops, on The Beatles “Tomorrow Never knows” (Revolver) Lennon asked George Martin to “Make his voice sound like it was coming from a distant mountain.” What they did in the middle passage was to record the vocals forward, re-record the tape backwards, then re-record it again forward…
Pretty innovative for the time although I have little doubt Sir Martin may have gotten the idea from the “French” studio experiment. The Beatles were quite fond of getting hammered and experimenting with various tape loops having no real studio budget… 'Bless 'em… And knowing the history, I also believe that Lennon may had discovered “turn me on, dead man” accidentally, I have little doubt he didn’t realize the end result, even if not by design.