> 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.
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.)
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.”
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.
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 one.
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.
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)
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.
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.