# Stairway to Heaven and other Songs with hidden messages **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 20, 2005, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115 "2005-06-20T20:54:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/21 "2005-06-21T01:56:17Z")
Larry Mudd writes: \> Now, all due respect to Jimmy Page, but there’s no freaking way he could have \> sat down and worked out lyrics that carry an intended message when played \> backwards. He just ain’t that smart. (I’d be surprised if anyone managed it.) Furthermore, Jimmy Page says that he made up the words of _Stairway to Heaven_ more or less spontaneously either as he recorded it or not long before recording it. There have been a number of threads on what the words of _Stairway to Heaven_ mean and we’ve pretty much concluded that the song is just hippie gibberish. Oh, you can see that Page was interested in Tolkien and Celtic mythology and occult magic and (for the nearest thing to a coherent meaning) that it’s about his encounters with selfish women, but there’s no real deep meaning to the song. ---
**Author:** ![alice\_in\_wonderland](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alice_in_wonderland/32/176_2.png) [@alice\_in\_wonderland](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alice_in_wonderland)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 2:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/22 "2005-06-21T02:07:22Z")
> [@asterion](#): > > I tried playing Stairway to Heaven backwards. The laser refused to read. Is this a woosh? Seriously - is it? Or do I have to go into vinyl vs. cd? Please tell me it’s a woosh. ---
**Author:** ![xash](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/c6cbf5/32.png) [@xash](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/xash)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/23 "2005-06-21T03:41:59Z")
Moved to CS. - **xash** General Questions Moderator ---
**Author:** ![Snooooopy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ee7513/32.png) [@Snooooopy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snooooopy)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/24 "2005-06-21T03:52:07Z")
I have a cassette player that, because it broke in a most fortunate way, is able to play stuff backwards. When a friend’s roommate wanted to find out what the hell Frank Zappa was saying in a song whose lyrics were all backwards, I was there to help! (For the record, the song wasn’t very interesting.) ---
**Author:** ![Superdude](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/superdude/32/13450_2.png) [@Superdude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superdude)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 4:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/25 "2005-06-21T04:20:32Z")
Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” from “Purple Rain,” _does_ contain a backwards message. I have verified this myself through listening to it. When I was a kid, I remember reading a story about it in “Weekly World News,” that bastion of credibility. Since I owned the 33, it was easy to prove or disprove. My record player had a neutral gear, so I put the 33 on, and rotated the album backwards. It says, “hello. How are you? I’m fine. Bye bye…the Lord is coming.” ---
**Author:** ![Rich\_Mann](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ce73a5/32.png) [@Rich\_Mann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rich_Mann)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 4:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/26 "2005-06-21T04:21:19Z")
I heard a radio interview with one of these guys that always find Satanic messages in rock music followed by another interview with a reputable sound engineer. The crackpot played a tape _he had made_ of ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ backwards and you could clearly hear “It’s fun to smoke marijuana, ha ha” being repeated during the chorus. The sound guy played the real commercial tape backwards and it just wasn’t there. Also the very real backwards message in an ELO song (I can’t remember which) was played and conspiracy-guy reads from his own transcript “Christ is a fernal” which he goes on to explain “everyone knows means a washed-up queer”. Listening to it, what I heard is “Christ is _eternal_” which is not a very Satanic-sounding message in my opinion. I don’t remember hearing anything about ‘Stairway’ in the interview, but it was probably cleared up by the sane professional as well. ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 4:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/27 "2005-06-21T04:53:00Z")
> [@Rich Mann](#): > > Also the very real backwards message in an ELO song (I can’t remember which) was played and conspiracy-guy reads from his own transcript “Christ is a fernal” which he goes on to explain “everyone knows means a washed-up queer”. Uh, actually _only he_ knows that and I wonder _how_ he knows. In other news, that made me laugh out loud. **Jojo** : Yeah, it’s obvious I’m no expert on British geography. I’m just glad I didn’t foul up the spelling. ---
**Author:** ![Happy\_Lendervedder](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/happy_lendervedder/32/8488_2.png) [@Happy\_Lendervedder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Happy_Lendervedder)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 5:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/28 "2005-06-21T05:48:41Z")
> [@Wendell Wagner](#): > > Larry Mudd writes: > > \> Now, all due respect to Jimmy Page, but there’s no freaking way he could have > \> sat down and worked out lyrics that carry an intended message when played > \> backwards. He just ain’t that smart. (I’d be surprised if anyone managed it.) > > Furthermore, Jimmy Page says that he made up the words of _Stairway to Heaven_ more or less spontaneously either as he recorded it or not long before recording it. There have been a number of threads on what the words of _Stairway to Heaven_ mean and we’ve pretty much concluded that the song is just hippie gibberish. Oh, you can see that Page was interested in Tolkien and Celtic mythology and occult magic and (for the nearest thing to a coherent meaning) that it’s about his encounters with selfish women, but there’s no real deep meaning to the song. Robert Plant wrote the lyrics. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/29 "2005-06-21T10:14:27Z")
> [@Larry Mudd](#): > > Ah, well that’s easy enough to dismiss out-of-hand as naive nonsense. > > It’s just plain impossible to do that. If it’s clear enough to be heard when played backwards, it’s going to be clear enough to hear when played forward – and reversed speech is clearly recognizable as reversed speech. You might just be able to get away with sneaking a backwards sound into something that’s totally cacophonous, but a verse of a song? Forget it. > > Both of the examples in the OP are alleged to contain reversed messages in the vocal tracks. If we’re going to talk about the possibility of such a thing being true, the only way for it to be so would be for the vocalist to actually be uttering something that is a phonetic reversal of the “hidden” message. > We should take people who think “backward masking” is an electronic studio technique as seriously as we would someone who claimed that some photographers use clever darkroom techniques to hide steganographic images in their photos that are revealed when the image is viewed in negative. (Does that analogy make sense? If we can see purple in the negative, it’s because we can see green in the positive. Can’t have one without the other.) I like the analogy, but the human perceptual system is quite good at picking out a single voice from the background - I don’t think it’s inconcievable that a reverse vocal track could be mixed in such a way that it would be _rather easy to ignore_ when the song is played normally, but _not too difficult to pick out_ when it is reversed. A more useful analogy, IMHO, would be one of those paintings that looks like one face the right way up and a totally a different face when it’s turned upside down, or [this](http://www.teachnet.com/powertools/entertain/puzzles/001907illusions/illusion1.html) one. ---
**Author:** ![Uvula\_Donor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/e19adc/32.png) [@Uvula\_Donor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uvula_Donor)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 10:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/30 "2005-06-21T10:21:14Z")
> [@Larry Mudd](#): > > Making up reverse speech that is bidirectionally coherant and information-bearing is _extremely_ difficult, if not actually impossible. . .The best one that I was ever able to come up with is “I’m scary Nevada,” which, played backwards, is “I have an earache – smell.” Oh, and you have to fudge the enunciation a bit to make it work. I just want to say that the phrase “Jesus loves you” backtracks almost perfectly to “We smell sausage.” ---
**Author:** ![Crandolph](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7cd45c/32.png) [@Crandolph](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crandolph)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/31 "2005-06-21T14:05:17Z")
> [@Superdude](#): > > It says, “hello. How are you? I’m fine. Bye bye…the Lord is coming.” I don’t know about you guys, but I’m sick of all these rock stars trying to steer decent Satanist children down the wrong path with all these backmasked Christian messages. Someone should do something about that. ---
**Author:** ![Hal\_Briston](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a9a28c/32.png) [@Hal\_Briston](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hal_Briston)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 2:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/32 "2005-06-21T14:46:50Z")
!flesruoy llik !seippup no pmots !selur natas ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/33 "2005-06-21T14:49:00Z")
> [@commasense](#): > > The obvious backward speech said, “The music is reversible but time is not. Turn back…Turn back.” (This is from memory, after more than 20 years, so it may not be perfect.) That’s exactly it. ---
**Author:** ![Rufus\_Xavier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/eada6e/32.png) [@Rufus\_Xavier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rufus_Xavier)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/34 "2005-06-21T15:02:08Z")
If you record yourself singing “row row row your boat” and then play it backwards, it sounds like “Toe brew war war war.” ---
**Author:** ![Ponder\_Stibbons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponder_stibbons/32/343_2.png) [@Ponder\_Stibbons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponder_Stibbons)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/35 "2005-06-21T15:06:10Z")
> [@Hal Briston](#): > > !flesruoy llik !seippup no pmots !selur natas Like, fnord, dude. ---
**Author:** ![commasense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/commasense/32/3017_2.png) [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/36 "2005-06-21T15:07:23Z")
> [@Mr. Blue Sky](#): > > That’s exactly it. Yeah, I can remember a pop song from 20-25 years ago perfectly, but I can’t remember what I went into the living room to get just this morning. :rolleyes: (I hadn’t made the connection before, but I guess with your user name, you’d be the expert on ELO. :D) ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/37 "2005-06-21T15:20:17Z")
> [@Rich Mann](#): > > I > Also the very real backwards message in an ELO song (I can’t remember which) was played and conspiracy-guy reads from his own transcript “Christ is a fernal” which he goes on to explain “everyone knows means a washed-up queer”. Listening to it, what I heard is “Christ is _eternal_” which is not a very Satanic-sounding message in my opinion. > > I don’t remember hearing anything about ‘Stairway’ in the interview, but it was probably cleared up by the sane professional as well. This is what we heard/were trained to hear on that ELO back-mask… “He is the nasty one, Christ- you’re infernal. And he will give you, give you six-six-six.” ---
**Author:** ![FriarTed](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/friarted/32/1052_2.png) [@FriarTed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FriarTed)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/38 "2005-06-21T15:22:08Z")
> [@Uvula Donor](#): > > I just want to say that the phrase “Jesus loves you” backtracks almost perfectly to “We smell sausage.” But “Bob loves you” played backwards sounds like “We smell Bob”. Even Jesus can change, but Bob always stays the same. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Wintermute](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e19b73/32.png) [@Wintermute](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wintermute)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/39 "2005-06-21T15:36:55Z")
I went to a church-run school growing up, so we were hit with this nonsense a lot. The thing I never understood, and could never really get a straight answer from the teacher/speaker/whomever (big surprise) was presuming there actually _was_ some sort of message recorded backward in a song, how was it supposed to influence me? When I could barely understand the “hidden” words even _with_ the suggested lyrics? I just never believed that my brain could pick out a backward message hidden underneath lyrics played forward and then decode said message. Nor did I believe the artists would go to all the trouble of hiding incomprehensible messages in their songs. Yeah, I got in trouble for my attitude a lot. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2005, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115/40 "2005-06-21T15:40:02Z")
The quote I always remember when this subject comes up comes from a recording engineer, who said that if back-masking was effective (in that you could subliminally understand the message even though it was backwards), then every single song recorded would have back-masking saying “BUY THIS RECORD!” To heck with getting kids to say their prayers and go to school. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/stairway-to-heaven-and-other-songs-with-hidden-messages/309115.md?page=3)