![]() ![]() The one whose little path would make me sad ![]() When those folks went looking for the devil in Zeppelin's music, they found it hiding in "Stairway to Heaven," which true believers claim contains the following backwards message: They seemed to scare the hell out of a lot of parents and religious types back in the early '70s, and I have a feeling that a lot of old record players got ruined when those worrywarts spun their way backwards through the band's catalog. Led Zeppelin is my go-to goldmine of dumb rock-music myths, and I love them for that. ![]() These are the same types of folks who apparently missed the obvious drug reference a few years earlier when The Lawrence Welk Show featured a spiritual take on "One Toke Over the Line." I'll post that here, because while not an example of backmasking silliness, it's still hilarious. I suppose it was a more innocent time, and maybe a rock song about smoking weed seemed scary I don't know. It's hard to believe that by 1980 a secret message to smoke weed would be news at all, but soon the rumor spread like spilled bongwater that "Another One Bites The Dust" played backwards was saying "It's fun to smoke marijuana." Scandalous. While not directly Satanic (unless you believe marijuana really is the "devil's weed"), religious weirdos got up in arms when they played the 1980 song "Another One Bites the Dust" backwards and thought they'd discovered a message encouraging pot-smoking. Freddie Mercury Says It's Fun to Get Baked The plaintiffs claimed that a backwards message was contained in the song "Better By You, Better Than Me," from Priest's 1978 Stained Class album, which instructed listeners to "Do it." One has to think Judas Priest would prefer to put messages in their records urging fans to buy more albums instead of telling them to commit suicide.Ĥ. The parents sued Judas Priest and their record company, in a ridiculous trial where the band was eventually found not guilty. While they certainly weren't the first rock band to be accused of infusing their albums with secret messages to harm their fans, Judas Priest probably had to deal with some of the worst real-world consequences, when they were taken to court after two fans of theirs attempted suicide, one successfully. Judas Priest Tells Fans to Shoot Themselves Let's take a look at some of the great moments in "Backmasking" on rock albums through the years.ĥ. The heyday for the "evil backwards message" hysteria seems to have been somewhere in the late 1960s to the early 1990s, which is a pretty good run for a silly rumor. While it might be entertaining to someone with a very naive view of good and evil to believe that there's some sort of tug-o-war between Satan and the forces of righteousness over weird "It kinda sounds like a message" snippets of sound embedded in the grooves of rock records, it's pretty ridiculous when one thinks it through. Fans of a certain age will especially remember certain types of watchdogs, particularly religious individuals, who are already convinced that rock is evil and Satanic, and have been spreading the tale that bands insert these messages into their songs as either a way to subliminally seduce innocent listeners into a sinful, self-destructive path, or to subtlely reveal the artists' secret diabolical agenda. This might be accomplished by starting with your "hidden message", listening to it playing backwards, and then trying to figure out what forward-sounding lyrics sound the most similar to the backwards message.One persistent rock myth is that for years bands have been secretly recording backwards messages onto their albums. You record your message on one tape, play it back in reverse, and while doing so, overdub it on top of your song.Īfter achieving this on a basic level, you can add complexity to the process by effecting the message recording, and dubbing it over a part of the song that is particularly busy, so that it becomes "hidden" in the texture of the final song - making it less obvious what you're doing when you listen normally, but still clear when playing in reverse.Ī substantially different method would be to write your lyrics in such a way that, when singing them with a very particular phrasing, you get a result that when played backwards starts to sound like a different set of words. Hiding a message in an audio recording in this manner requires only simple tape manipulation techniques of overdubbing and tape reversal. I would say this is "famously claimed" :-) - I'd be surprised if this was found to have been intentional.īut of course, the rumor of Stairway's hidden message spread throughout popular culture, and since the technique to actually execute something like this is relatively simple, it has certainly occurred in media since then. ![]()
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