Play the Record Backwards, Part 1

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert is joined by Rusty Needle’s Record Club host Seth Nicholas Johnson for a discussion of various means of secreting information into audio, from backmasking and locked grooves to examples from the digital age of music.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Seth is, of course the producer of Stuff to All
Your Mind, but he also co hosts the music podcast

(00:23):
Rusty Needles Record Club. Today's episode is going to be
something of a crossover episode because we're gonna be talking
about Stuff to Blow your Mind type stuff, but this
one is going to veer directly into vinyl record territory
for I think a large, a large portion of the episode,
and especially when you get into that area, I'm I'm
really gonna have to defer to you, seth uh, being

(00:46):
the master of records that you are, and with myself
being someone who was told from an early age not
to touch records and being an obedient child, I obeyed
everyone on that and I have virtually not touched any
vinyl my entire life, because that's what grown ups are
supposed to do. You know, it's not actually a bad
rule to make for children, because you know they are

(01:08):
very delicate and um not not only um do I
manufacture vinyl on my own, which is has taught me
a lot about it. But also, um, I run a
record label, so I've had it pressed at at vinyl factories,
and and I'm a big vinyl collector on my own,
and even me, I'm I'm very familiar with what you
should and shouldn't touch. Basically only touched the rim and

(01:29):
the label never touched the grooves. Even I just because
I'm a human being, I'll be clumsy and drop something
You'll like scratch against an edge and like, well, that's
ruined forever, you know, So I can't imagine entrusting that
to a child, you know. Uh, That's why children's records
are always just scratched into oblivion. So so you know,
I I understand, and I also understand why even adults

(01:52):
have are hesitance to to to jump into that world.
But I also see the attraction of it obviously. I mean,
in a weird house, cinema episodes are always pointing out
which movies score has been re released in some sort
of strange ultra rare vinyl release, and and it's often
beautiful for just from a packaging standpoint, but also when

(02:14):
you get down to the details of the record pressing,
Like I see the appeal of it. So it's not
for for lack of of occasionally thinking, hey I could,
I could start getting into vinyl. But but yeah, just
from from an early age I was I was told
shouldn't touch that, and I agree. I mean, it's it's
wonderful for forcing yourself to be actually involved in what

(02:35):
you're consuming musically. That's my favorite part about vinyl. Sure,
the sound quality is better, There's there's no getting around that.
It is better. But uh, in addition to that, I
love that I need to put the record on the
little turntable, I need to turn on my stereo, gotta
put the needle in the groove, I need to wait
fifteen to thirty minutes, flip it over, put put it

(02:57):
back on the other side. You know, like like I
have an active interest in what I'm listening to, and
therefore it makes me appreciate it more. It's just like
eating sunflower seeds, you know. Cracking open the shells is
half the fun, you know. Okay, so you give that
tactile experience with it. It's not just a passive series
of zeros and ones being pre chosen by an algorithm.

(03:18):
I chose this record, I'm putting it on. I'm making
these noises happen in my own small contribution way. So
in this episode, we're going to be talking in general
about things hidden in music. Uh, you might think of
them as easter eggs, um or any other number of
terms you might use hidden messages if you'd rather. And
we'll also be talking about accusations and panics associated with

(03:41):
some of these techniques, the psychology involved, and specific examples
from music history. And as we explain these various record
based techniques, I will give some real world examples of
them that you can find in your local record store
and that hey, I think you should listen to, because
I think every example I give is something that I'm like, Yes,
I recommend this, go check out out excellent. Yeah. And

(04:02):
some of these examples are gonna come up are things
that were mentioned in papers I'll be citing, but they're
obviously ones in many cases you are very familiar with,
and you can perhaps give a little more background on. Right,
all right, So the first stop is going to take
us back before musical recording was possible, or at least
to a time when the main way to record music

(04:22):
was at least via media, was to put it on
paper was to write down the music, and even then
a certain amount of of musical encoding is possible. So
we have to be reminded that music is information. So
it shouldn't come as a surprise that hidden information can
be present in music in ways that predate analog or
digital media. Not even getting into what's possible with language itself,

(04:46):
because obviously, uh, you know, any given songs, lyrics in
any given language, there's gonna be a enough complexity there
that you can hide things that you can you can
sort of get across points, uh, subliminate lee, you can
use metaphors. I mean, all the weapons of language are
at your disposal if you at all know how to
use them when you're crafting lyrics and uh. But but

(05:10):
beyond that, we can certainly look at examples of musical cryptograms,
because basically musical symbols and musical notes can and have
been used in substitution ciphers. And we've talked about substitution
ciphers on past episodes of Stuff to blow your mind.
When musical theorists in the West began to assign letter
names to notes, steering I believe the ninth century, see

(05:33):
it also became possible to turn things around. Uh though
it wasn't until I believe the Romantic period and beyond
that that this was really explored. So you might be wondering, Okay,
what are you talking about here with the obviously we
have notes, we haven't play an A play a B natural, etcetera.
And this is where we see a great example of this,

(05:54):
and this is the one that I mentioned a number
of you're familiar with, um the famed Baroque composer Johan
Sebastian Bach, who through seventeen fifty would employ what we
call the Bach motif. So that's a B flat and
a A c and then a B natural. Now you
might say, well, well that's a B A C B
that what that's that's meaningless? Well, in German a B

(06:17):
flat is B and a B natural is H, thus
spelling out Bach clever. Maybe maybe once it's been explained,
maybe a little too obvious, but but yeah, there it's
an example where he decided to using the system in
place to to to label these different sounds, to then

(06:39):
turn it around and write is no own name in
the music itself. And there are numerous other examples of
this from other composers you know, I've actually looked this
up before because it is it's a fun idea to
communicate with the sounds of notes. In fact, I remember
there was a gosh, I believe it was a scene
in the Paul Thomas Anderson's film Magnolia where they're on

(07:00):
like a game show and these are like what these
are things you'll bring to a picnic and they'll just
play notes and they'll like spell out the words, so
like e G G. I'll bring an egg that kind
of thing, you know, like it's it's it's something you
can do and it's fun, it's puzzle e it's it's
good times. So I've looked this up in the past.
There are approximately, especially if you include the h as

(07:21):
as a part of it, around two hundred words that
you can spell using just musical notes, so you know,
things like cabbage head. You know, like these things, these
things are possible, they're they're a part of that language.
So I think it would be difficult, but I bet
you could form a message, you could form sentences, and
you know, we'll talk more about more examples right now. Yeah, yeah,

(07:43):
I mean, because you're essentially talking about music obsessed individuals,
total music nerds in different ages just eventually getting in
there and just experimenting with what they could do. Be
it something that was about creating new sound, elevating the art, etcetera,
or just having a laugh, and that's those those two

(08:03):
ideas seemed to run throughout the history of of this
kind of hidden messages in music activity. They are also
older examples of musical cryptograms, including the work of Renaissance
musician Joaquin d. Prey lived fourteen fifty five through fifteen
twenty one. He was a French Flemish composer and he

(08:25):
composed a particular work this is Missa Hercules du Ferrari.
It was for the Duke of Ferrara, and the music
is derived from the musical letters in the duke's name.
A musical cryptogram that was later known is the saghetto cavato.

(08:45):
Another example, American occultist Paul Foster Case would create a
cryptogram in the twentieth century that made use of esoteric
symbols and concepts, and if I understand what I was
reading on it correctly, it used occult sim oles Hebrew
and Latin to translate a word into notes. Though the
usage here would be more ceremonial than anything. Um, but

(09:07):
but one of one of one of several examples will
be touching on that it that either is within the
realm of the occult or we'll touch on examples later
that are more in the area of sort of like
faux occultism or accusations of occultism, etcetera. So those are
all excellent examples. But let's give our audience one more

(09:28):
that's a bit more modern. Something they can they can
go find a record of right now, the nineteen seventy
seven album Let There Be Rock by A C d C.
They close with a song called a Whole Lot of Rosy,
where the primary guitar riff goes A C A D
A C A or Akadaca, which is A C d
c's nickname in their home country of Australia. Ah, that's impressive.

(09:52):
I had no idea about that, huh so Johan Sebastian Bach. Also,
the members of A C d C all all the
same brain when it comes to coding the songs. Here, yes,
shoulder to shoulder. So there's just there's just a few
brief examples to demonstrate what is It was possible even
before analog and digital media becomes involved in the scenario.

(10:14):
But at this point let's move on to some more
analog examples. So the first thing we're gonna look at
with actual recorded audio is something that I'm sure many,
if not most, of you are familiar with at this point,
either by virtue of various panics over popular music, especially
satanic panic, and it's um reverberations through media from everything

(10:37):
you know, from horror movies to to supernatural television shows
and so forth. But also it impacts actual record and
actual recording practice, an actual production practice, a technique known
as back masking. So before we get into any actual
examples of back masking or allegations of back masking, and
this is where it gets, it gets very weird because

(11:00):
it seems like on the surface you would think either
you're doing it or you're not doing it. And if
you're doing it, truly it's it's provable, but I guess
a little more ambiguous than that. So in simple terms,
this is reversing audio, especially recordings of human speech, playing
it backwards in a recording. In many cases you know

(11:21):
you know it when you hear it. Basic backwards speech,
which is also sometimes utilized in media for like alien
words or arcane spells and so forth. A lot of
times it's used for creepy effects, and I think we
all we you know what, when you hear it, you
can hear this this sound effect, and it's it's people
speaking backwards. Um, that's what it is. It's almost unfortunate

(11:42):
that we're also familiar with it at this point because
back in the old days, before you know, before we
all walked around with computers in our pockets and we
all have the ability to record ourselves whenever we wanted,
it must have truly sounded foreign. You know, it's it's
here audio played backwards, and it's been like, wow, what
is that. I've ever heard any creature make that noise before?
And now when we hear it, we just go, oh,

(12:04):
that's that's reverse audio. We know what it sounds like,
you know, we know, we know the hallmarks of it. Yeah,
And I guess with with actual reverse audio, like one
of two things happens. It just sounds weird and cool.
That sounds like dark magic and so forth, And I
think that's especially nowadays. That's how most of us hear it.
But also the brain can't help but lean into it,

(12:25):
and sometimes try and hear things in it. Uh, And
that gets into a whole other area. Now, the other
side of the equation we mentioned allegations um of of
of back masking, erroneous back masking, arguments that, especially um
dangerous seeming rock bands of previous decades, the idea that

(12:46):
they were actually back back masking in a way so
that what sounds like just normal lyrics can be reversed
and have a totally different meaning, usually one that is
satanic or sometimes not. There's a great episode of The
Simpsons where a joke is made that Paul McCartney uh
snuck in a recipe for lentil soup into Maybe I'm Amazed.

(13:10):
We have to play it backwards to hear it. And
here's actually the really fun part. Over the closing credits
of that episode of The Simpsons, they do play maybe
I'm amazed. This is actually a famous episode. This is
the one where at least becomes a vegetarians this episode.
That's a great episode. Yeah, and um so uh in
that episode they do play maybe I'm Amazed over the
closing credits. And if you actually record the closing credits

(13:33):
audio and reverse it, they really did insert a recipe
for lentil soup into that song. It's wonderful. Wow. I
had no idea, not in the real song, only in
the Simpsons episode. Wow. Yeah. So it shouldn't surprise anyone
that this practice goes back pretty much is as long
as we've had the ability to record and play back speech.

(13:54):
In fact, I was reading, you know, there's a book
titled Language, Myths, Mysteries, and Magic from Any fourteen, and
there's an article in there on backmasking by Karen stoles Now,
and the author points out that this actually goes all
the way back to Thomas Edison around eighteen seventy seven,
as the noted American inventor and businessman would would experiment

(14:15):
with playing music backwards I think, notably a whistled version
of Yankee Doodle Dandy um, and this would have been
used via um tinfoil phonograph recordings. He observed that music
quote is still melodious in many cases, and some of
the strains are sweet and novel, but altogether different from

(14:37):
the song reproduced in the right way. And uh, I
think we're I think this is a realization that certainly
someone like Thomas Edison was in a position to uh,
acknowledge and admire back then, and then there's kind of
been a wave of it throughout audio history and certainly nowadays.
I've never really looked at this before, but if you

(14:58):
go on like YouTube, you'll find so many examples of
people taking music and reversing like whole albums just to
play it backwards and see what happens. Uh. Sometimes they
have a specific thing they're going for, maybe there after
something in the lyrics, or it's one of the cases
that will be touching on later on in this episode.
But other times, especially with I saw the number of

(15:19):
like ambient albums, people just want to experience the album
they love, both both the forwards and backwards. I've got
another little recommendation to throw in here. Okay, So there
is a wonderful musician and his name, his real name
is Dave Portner, but he goes by A V taar
A V tear is most famously from the band Animal Collective,

(15:41):
but he has a wonderful solo career as well. Uh.
There was a time when he was married to one
of the members of the band Moom and her name
was Krea Breckon. Okay, so they released while they were
married a collaborative album together called Pull Hair Rubbi. All right, now, Um,
when this album first leaked back in the days when

(16:02):
like leaking was a big issue. Uh, folks would listen
to and they were like, oh, this is a bad leak.
It sounds like the entire album is played backwards. Someone
let me know when you get a real version of
the leak. Well, A V. Tare himself came onto these
boards and was like, no, no, that's that's the real version.
When he and his wife had finished recording their album,

(16:22):
they decided, you know, the entire album sounds better if
you play it backwards. So what became a pretty straightforward
folk album became a pretty foreign sounding backwards album. And
it's it's wonderful. It's called Pull Hair Rubb. I. I
highly recommend it, and um, it sounds almost instrumental. It
sounds very foreign, and it sounds very strange because once

(16:44):
they did reverse it initially and they decided, yes, this
whole album just will be backwards versions of every single song.
Then they did start leaning into that. Then they made
special decisions that really highlighted those choices, and it worked
out really well. Genuinely, it's a wonderful album. I think
people should listen to it on a very I guess
kind of simple level. It reminds me a lot of

(17:06):
what's going on with AI and creativity nowadays, be it
with text or visuals, where you have a level of
human uh creativity that's going into the machine, it's getting
spat out in some form, and then there's going to
be a certain amount of tweaking, either after tweaking to
the resulting material, or then going back and saying, Okay,

(17:28):
now I see what the technology does to what I
started with. What can I do to optimally, um change
the results and make it even more in line with
what I'm trying to create. I think this has been
something UM that's an element of creativity that people have
used forever, which is just taking some of the decisions
out of the hands of the creator to help influence

(17:49):
something else, whether it be like those um you know
those like cut up practices where you're trying to write lyrics,
so you write little words, put them in a hat
and pull them out one by one, or um you
know those famous Brian Eno cards where there's like difference
like prompts written on each card that you pull out,
and that's supposed to help you with your production process.
Like you know, there's there's lots of examples of this,

(18:10):
and yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think
AI and intentional reversing just takes a few of those
decisions out of the hands of the artist. Now Stalls
Now also shares an another example from Edison. Edison and
his colleagues were apparently also fond of taking recordings of
someone saying mad dog and playing it backwards so that

(18:30):
it sounded like God damn. And this was this was
not any kind of early satanic record recording. This was
apparently just pure novelty. They just observed that this was
the case and found it amusing. But it touches on
something that will will keep coming back to the idea
that sometimes when you take spoken language and you reverse

(18:53):
it, it it can sound like other words in that language,
um and yeah. And then there's a lot of psychological
layering to put on top of that, but we'll get
to that than now. Eventually, real to real tapes came along.
This would have been the nineteen thirties, and it became

(19:14):
increasingly easy for audio lovers to experiment with the medium. So,
for instance, French composer Pierre Schaefer lived experimented with tape looping, sampling,
and back masking, and the use of backmasking would then
increase among avant garde musicians during the nineteen fifties, according
to stas Now, and and certainly I think a lot

(19:35):
of you out there can can think of various um
recording artists who use some of these tools, tape loops especially.
There are a lot of ambient um recording artists that
I can think of that that make use of this.
But you know, it comes down to just manipulating the
recorded data at heart. Now, in the history of backmasking,

(19:56):
it's impossible to talk about all this without touching on
the Beatles. And it's it's not just because of the
Beatles are are popular and uh and are an easy
uh band of source for all this like that they were.
They really were the ones that are credited with sort
of bringing back masking into the main stream, both for
for good and kind of also for uh for bad,

(20:17):
for the you know, leaning into the whole panic area
so um. To be clear, though, all major and serious accounts,
which which stalls Now discusses in their paper, seemed to
to to to drive on the Beatles engaged in backmasking
purely for novelty's sake. Um this entails large. I think

(20:38):
the main examples here three tracks off of the legendary
nine six album Revolver. That would be I'm Only Sleeping
Tomorrow Never Knows, but then also the single Rain, which
wasn't on that album but came out of the same recordings.
So specifically on these I'm Only Sleeping you have a
back masked lead guitar part by George Harrison. So George

(20:59):
Harrison played it one way. When they were tinkering around
if You're going out, you know, how they were putting
all this together, they said, hey, we like it better
in reverse. Let's use it that way. It helps create
this kind of dream like, uh, you know, psychedelic sound. Yeah,
I'm sure just novelty variety, and probably just purely aesthetics.
It's just what dictated these decisions for them. I mean,

(21:20):
and sure maybe maybe part of it was like, hey,
it'll be funny if people try to reverse these things
because they sound backwards, but I bet that wasn't really
the primary thoughts. I'm sure aesthetics were the first and
foremost decision maker there yeah, I've seen it mentioned that
the John Lennon and producer George Martin both kind of
took credit for the discovery, but both in in kind
of casual ways, like I think George Martin was more

(21:42):
along that it was more along the lines of like, yeah,
we were experimenting and this sounded good, and John Lennon
was more more likely to say, well, I was really
high at the time and I kind of discovered it
either way, though, Yeah, Tomorrow Never Knows also has backwards
guitar on it, and then Rain stands out a little
bit because it features backward vocals. So these are popular

(22:06):
and I guess somewhat obvious examples of back masking in
the biggest band in the world. And so of course
this leads to greater scrutiny, great greater awareness of the technique. Um.
And this is going to mean that that later on
people were looking at subsequent Beatles albums and saying, well,
I wonder, what's what's farwards, what back what's backwards? Are

(22:26):
they using this again? Um? And this ends up this
ends up leading to a lot of speculation from some
of the more I guess, you know, conspiracy minded fans
about what maybe hidden in subsequent albums those stalls Now
writes in their paper quote, there were no hidden messages
until the fans and fanatics went looking for them. And

(22:49):
so from here we begin to veer into this area
of of accusations of back masking and getting into urban
legends about songs like Revolution nine off of White album.
If this is something I wasn't super familiar with, but
there's a voice saying number nine, number nine, number nine,

(23:11):
and the legend goes that if you if you reverse that,
you hear turn me on dead Man, and um, you can.
You can find examples of this on I think just
the Wikipedia page for the Wide album or for Revolution
number nine, and you can hear it. I was listening
to it just the other day, and I have to
say I did not find it particularly convincing. I feel

(23:32):
like you really have to want to hear turn Me
on Dead Man. And then you get into that area
where it's like, if this is the hidden message, why
is the hidden message? Like so like clunky? Yeah, but
you I think you can say that about um, something
that I think you're coming to, which is all of
the Paul Is Dead clues that are out there. Uh,

(23:55):
this was taken as one of those as a Oh,
this is just an indicator if folks don't know. There's
a a long held rumor slash conspiracy theory that is
clearly very untrue, but people just like to talk about
it that Paul died in a car crash early on
in the Beatles career and then he was replaced by
a Paul look alike at one point. Um, it's obviously

(24:18):
very untrue, but there are many examples that conspiracy theorists
like to talk about, like, um, oh gosh, here here's one.
For example, if you look at the cover of Abbey
Road picture in your mind, you have the four Beatles
walking across the road. Uh, They're all dressed in kind
of interesting clothing, very distinct from one another. Um here,

(24:39):
I'm going off top my head, but I think I
can do this all the way. At the back, you
have George Harrison, who is dressed kind of like a
working man, kind of like working man's clothes, denim, nothing fancy.
In front of that, you have Ringo who's wearing like
kind of a fancier suit and tie. Okay. In front
of that you have Paul, also dressed, you know, pretty
casually and I think he's not wearing shoes, all right,

(25:00):
And then in front of him you have John Lennon
who is dressed all in white with long flowing hair, etcetera, etcetera.
So the message you were supposed to receive from that
is that John Lennon was God and he was taking
home the dead body of Paul McCartney. He wasn't wearing
shoes because something to do with like being buried without

(25:20):
your shoes on. It was. It was something that's one referenced.
Ringo represented like the priest who was like burying and
giving the eulogy, and George Harrison was representing the grave digger,
the man actually burying Paul, and it's like, yeah, I
guess you know, like that's that's quite a stretch. There's
a lot of other things too, Like if you hold

(25:42):
a mirror up to the bass drum on the cover
of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it allegedly like
gives you the date that Paul died. And like if
you look at like the pictures on the cover of
Let It Be, I think Paul's is the only one
with like a red background and everyone else's his white
or something like that, like there's all these little things

(26:02):
and they're all meaningless. But this, this was another one
that turned me on dead Man. It's I don't know,
I don't know why someone could put some so much
stock in this, but I suppose it's fun, you know,
just to look for clues and and and hints and stuff. Yeah,
I mean, we have to remember this is in the
wake of of Beatlemania, and we could think of it
as like a heretical strain of Beatlemania that began to

(26:24):
attach itself to these various cryptic details in either the
uh you know that the advanced production design of the music,
or the advanced record design, you know, illustration work and
graphic design on the albums. There's plenty to sort of
latch onto in both of these, and um, some of
one of those things. I guess you look at a

(26:45):
lot of conspiracy thinking some of this may have began
for fun, it's just as an amusement, but then it
can kind of take on an energy of its own,
and you begin to wonder to what extent or people
truly buying into this idea that Paul is dead and
has been replaced by a look alike and Obviously, the
most rational thing you would do if you were perpetrating

(27:06):
this kind of conspiracy was leave a lot of clues
for it in your subsequent album output. Absolutely so. Anyway,
Paul McCartney was not dead then and as of this
recording still alive. Actually now, it is worth noting that
A Day in the Life off of Sergeant Pepper's Only
Hearts Club Band, which will come back to again, that
it does contain some sounds that are just for dogs though.

(27:29):
There there's also the allegation that a reverse section at
the end of the song can be reversed into something crude.
But according to to to Martin, this is all just
gibberish reverse. They just recorded a lot of gibberish and
then reversed it. I mean, I mean, you could hear
nearly anything in anything. I remember personally. I had a
copy of um Crosby Stills in Nash Deja Vu, and

(27:52):
when I was younger, I played the title track backwards
because why not, you know, I had a record player,
why not play it backwards? And there was a section
where I swore, my little teenage brain, I swore that
they said you cannot hide hide amongst them. Okay, So
I was hanging out a friend of mine's house and
I heard her her I think it was her stepfather,

(28:14):
was in the other room playing this record out loud,
and I was like, oh my gosh, I know a
hidden message in this record that if you if you
play it backwards, that it says you cannot hide, hide
amongst them. And she's like, oh, go tell him, go
tell them, Like okay, this is gonna be great. So
I go to this adults little teenage boy, like, you know,
if you play this song backwards, you can hear, you
can hear hidden messages, you can hear you cannot hide,

(28:35):
hide amongst them. And he goes. He stares me for
a while cox's head. He's like, you smoke a lot
of pot, do you No, I'm just a music lover.
I love plagued my records backwards, And yeah, didn't. Didn't.
I didn't get the reaction I was hoping for, which
was all in praise and a standing ovation. But oh well,

(28:55):
this is a great time for me to ask this though,
because I guess this is some thing that should be
obvious to to people who use record players. But I
didn't even think about this. But every every record player
gives you the ability to play both forward and backwards.
Is that correct? Almost? Almost? Um, some of them do
it deliberately, Like there are record players that I own

(29:17):
that literally have a switch that you can go from
forwards to backwards. And that's if you have a quote
unquote like fancy record player, that button will be there.
And that's that's a very useful thing to have, especially
we're trying to like cue up an exact moment in
a song, that kind of thing. So yeah, so that
that that is a feature that many record players have
a literal reverse button, but on the less expensive ones.

(29:38):
And this is the way I used to do when
I was younger. You would turn off the belt that
that that that drives the actual turning of the record,
and you would but you would leave the speaker on
and you would manually move your hand backwards pushing the
record in reverse, which makes it sound even creepier because
it's not even like, you know, at like a regular pace.
It's got like this like human lurch too. It's you know. So,

(30:01):
but but I also know that there are record players
that just will not go and reverse no matter if
you push them, you'll just end up breaking them. So yeah,
there's there's different kinds, but some actually just have a
button that plays it in reverse. Interesting, Well, this is
this is all telling because it does sound, from what
you're saying, like just the basic vinyl record scenario would

(30:21):
sort of put the tools in the average music fans
hands to sort of go in and investigate for themselves,
um and uh and and find things potentially or confirm
things that they heard they might find. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
So again, by most accounts, backmasking by the Beatles was
generally more about novelty and dumb jokes, but that doesn't

(30:42):
mean that occult backmasking didn't take place. According to Jonathan Winel,
Darryl Griffith's, and Stewart Cunningham in Easter Eggs, Hidden Tracks
and Messages and Musical Mediums, occultist Alistair Crowley encourage practitioners
to engage backwards thinking by listening who recordings backwards. And
while I think this sounds kind of silly, this notion

(31:06):
and the ripples of this notion certainly influenced the eventual
place of backtracking in Satanic panic Um Satanic panic. Of course,
this is something that we've touched on the show before.
This was a moral panic, mostly in the United States
and then also in um in the UK and parts
of Europe during the eighties and nineties, though it's reverberations

(31:28):
in subsequent years and subsequent decades can be found in
different parts of the world and also in different sort
of communities and certainly faith communities as well. Basically just
whips everyone into a frenzy over the idea that something
that had never really existed in the world, that is,
the organized worship of Satan, was in engaging in covert

(31:49):
means of corrupting the youth of the world, as well
as ritually torturing and murdering children. So, um, yeah, there's
much more one can say about Satanic pan uh in
its awfulness, but and and and also the like the
real cost of it to to actual human beings. There's
also a lot to be said into how it ends

(32:10):
up impacting media, how it impacts music and horror and
so forth. Um, But back masking comes into play as
a part of all of this as well, because you
had allegations that scary metal bands and even bands that
we might not think of today as being that scary,
we're using backmasking to corrupt listeners with incantations of devil, magic, drugs,

(32:32):
and more. Which this era is so baffling to me
because I suppose, if you're the kind of person that
wants to believe in this organized worship of Satan that's
happening right under your nose, any of your neighbors could
be a Satan worshiper. I suppose you're also the same
same kind of person that's going to believe that a
backwards incantation can do something have some effects in the

(32:56):
real world. So I don't know, Like, like, I just
hope for the practice cold minds of most people to go, wait,
there's a backwards spell on this, Oh well, good things
spells don't work, so who cares? You know? Yeah, it
ultimately raises a bunch of ridiculous questions when you when
you start analyzing it with a logical mind. But and

(33:16):
then some of them too. It just it just made
absolutely no sense. It makes no sense to me. For example,
it was alleged at one point that A. C. D.
C's Highway to Hell contained back masked lyrics, and when
asked about this, Anger's Young refuted it by saying, hey, well,
there's nothing subliminal about the the actual lyrics to the song.
Part of the lyrics are hey, Satan paying my dues

(33:38):
playing in a rocking band? Like what if? Like what
why do you need to also hide the Satanism? If
you're basically saying praise Satan right there in the lyrics,
I don't get it. And there were these were but
these were real accusations with potentially real consequences for bands
and record companies at the time. For instance, one accusation

(34:00):
that picked up steam among evangelicals, especially at the time.
And this is one that I imagine a lot of
you have heard, and there are examples of this. You
can pull up on Wikipedia for the entry for this song.
But led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven classic rock song, like
it's it's a song that, uh, I think it is great,
but I couldn't tell you because I've heard it too
many times on the radio. So it's it's not my

(34:21):
favorite led Zeppelin song because I've just heard it too
many times. It would not be like in the top
ten for me. And it contains it does contain some
actual lyrics. That's that go as follows. If there's a
bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed. Now I'm not
entirely sure what that means, but that those are just
part of the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven. And the

(34:42):
accusation is that if you play this backwards, then you
hear the words here's to my sweet Satan, the one
whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.
He'll give you, He'll give you six six six. There
was a little tool shed where he made us suffer sad.
Satan way too elaborate for back basket, not a chance.

(35:04):
I mean I after I read this, I listened to
the example of it, and I mean it is it
is creepy to hear because you are hearing reverse language.
You are hearing uh, you are hearing something that sounds
like Satan. But then on the other hand, it's so
ridiculous sounding, like what does this even mean? Like if

(35:24):
I were to take this at face value, why what
is the tool shed doing for me in this scenario?
Like nothing in this is is is really all that
creepy compared to any actual Satanic lyrics, So really there
are there are plenty of examples in led Zeppelin's lyrics
that are, on the face more shocking than what we

(35:45):
have right here in the alleged back masking. I mean,
I mean, and also I think, um, certain words just
when they get reversed automatically kind of sound creepy. Like.
For example, I remember Yoko on No got accused of this.
She had a song called kiss, Kiss, Kiss, and of
course when you play kiss kiss kiss backwards, it's six
six six for sure. And um, you know I I yeah,

(36:07):
I think certain words just sound easily like other words backwards.
But I don't believe for a moment that this many
words could sound good forwards and backwards, not for a second. Yeah,
I mean, also the weird exercise you'd have to go
through to get to this point. Um. I think the

(36:28):
other important thing is like when you when you reverse lyrics,
when you reverse words, you're gonna get other sounds. But
those sounds are not going to have real context until
you give them contexts and you you say like, well, yeah,
that that sound, that that kind of six six six sound,
it's gonna sound like like six six six, uh, that
sort of thing. Yeah, it's a real Laurel or Yanny situation. Yeah,

(36:51):
I think the other telling thing about this, but first
of all, it's an accusation that Robert Plant and their
audio engineer at the time refuted um and and unlike
with the Beatles, it doesn't seem like the band or
those involved in producing the tracks really found this technique
all that interesting. And I don't know this is maybe
just me, but I feel like if they had actually
done this on purpose, It's one thing to cover it

(37:14):
up during the the initial period of satanic panic during
the you know, certainly in the eighties and even nineties,
But it seems like if this, if they had actually
backmasked some content here and gone to some links to
put some satanic silliness in here, it would have come
out right like how great are are the surviving members
of led Zeppelin going to really be at keeping secrets

(37:35):
like this? I mean, um, I think when these things happened,
Like another example of this that was famous at the
time was the supposed sinking of playing Pink Floyd's Dark
Side of the Moon with the Wizard of Oz, and
I gave you this whole experience with the two lined
up perfectly, and everyone in Pink Floyd is like, how
would we do that? You know, like the we were

(37:58):
just like in a studio. Everything's analog, like we didn't
have like, you know, no, of course not, of course
we couldn't have done that, you know, yeah, or like
can you imagine that the reality where they're like, yes,
this is actually how we make all of our albums.
We we pick a classic movie, we play it, and
we just match things up with what's happening on the screen. Um.
I mean that could be somebody's artistic um technique, but yeah,

(38:22):
it's just those connections are not made by the creator.
Those connections are made by on your end when you
combine two things and look for meaning between those two things,
which can be fun, but don't believe it, you know,
like fun is fun as long as you don't believe
this nonsense. Yeah, enjoy it, but don't ruin by going
too far into rank. So I mentioned that there were

(38:50):
potential real consequences for all this, Like it got to
the point where there were actually some lawmakers that were
interested in demanding backtracking warnings on our albums so that
consumers would could be aware that there might be hidden messages,
which is ridiculous to imagine, like may contain hidden messages
that may contained electric guitar. And this is another thing

(39:13):
getting back to I mentioned earlier, how when you have
the full tools of language at your disposal, there's so
many things you can do to manipulate people, to um,
to hide your message, to say something kind of cheeky
so that some people get it but others don't. There's
plenty of stuff you can do with UM with language
that hasn't been reversed, and great lyricists are going to

(39:34):
be able to use those tools. Like doing this whole
backtracking technique is just such a crude and ineffective way
of hiding your secret message if you actually have a
secret message you want to get out there, and especially
too if you want to keep it a secret for
most people. Like like, for example, UM, let's say you're
trying to send a secret message on a sheet of
paper and you just write each of the letters backwards,

(39:57):
so you have to hold it up and look at
it in the mirror to read the best. Yeah, someone's
going to figure it out. Like now, let let's let's
say you take the first letter of each word in
your lyrics and it spells a new secret message. Hey,
that's that's going to be actually harder to decipher, you know,
So it's it's not even a very good secret message. Yeah,
I mean it. We mentioned Don McClain recently on the

(40:19):
show when we discussed the flight of Dragons, like American
Pie has plenty of cryptic content within it and um
and and that is achieved without reversing anything. Right. So anyway,
getting back to this idea that like, why why would
you need a label? Right, why would there need to
be a warning saying my contained secret messages because if
it's backwards, I can't understand it. Right. Well, that's where

(40:42):
we get into these claims, and I think these are
this is this is pretty much been refuted as pseudoscience
at this point, but this idea that backmasked messages can
be understood subconsciously even if you're not consciously understanding them.
So one of the main prop onent's of the power
of reverse speech is an individual by the name of

(41:04):
David John Oates. And this is a guy that's appeared
on the likes of Coast to Coast. Uh. This is
the you know, the radio station radio show rather that's
popular and known for its various treatment of UFOs and
so forth. You know a lot of what I guess
you've described the sort of fringe ideas and Oates would

(41:25):
discuss this, this notion that normal speech contains a smaller
percentage of backward speech that I'm not sure I even
understand exactly what the idea here is that maybe it
kind of cuts to the chase a bit that the
thing that you're sort of trying to say through with
forward facing speech, you're also saying, at least in a

(41:45):
simplistic form, through the reverse of the speech. There is
an example that is sometimes used to support this, and
it's apparently if you take Neil Armstrong nine and saying
small step for man, of course during the lunar landing,
if you were to reverse that, uh, it sounds something
like manual spacewalk. And um, this one I thought sounded

(42:08):
pretty pretty silly to me. I mean, what does that
even mean? Why? What? What? What's my take home from
that you have? If if this is some sort of
meaningful content, like I guess it, it would at best
mean that the smart things that you say forwards sounds
stupid or backwards. It doesn't make any sense if if
it at least like predicted the future, it would be helpful,
you know, like, um, oh, let's say he said small

(42:31):
step for man and then in reverse. It it actually
said like, hey, watch out for that rock over there,
you're gonna trip over. It's like that would be helpful.
He could use that information, you know, But but no, this,
this is this is nothing. This is nonsense. Yeah. So
again this has been widely refuted in scientific literature pseudo science,
and one of the central arguments is that, okay, with

(42:53):
with Oates work and with well not even just Oats work,
but just in general, if you're trying to push this
idea that that the thing that you're about to hear
reversed is going to say something else, it depends heavily
on priming. Uh, you're being you're given an idea of
what you were about to hear backwards. And I encountered

(43:13):
that time and time again researching for this episode. Like
when you go to the the the audio audio examples
on the Wikipedia for Stairway to Heaven, it tells you
what you're about to hear, what you're gonna hear straightforward,
and what you were expected to hear uh in reverse.
So you're you're going into a it to it to
it looking for that template to line up. But what's

(43:35):
really going on is something called paraidolia. This is the
tendency for humans to find meaning in something, be it
uh seeing a face in the surface of the moon,
secret messages in a reverse song, uh, connections between this
album and this movie when this movie is played on mute,
that sort of thing. And it's I mean, it's a
powerful force. It's it's a it's something that guides a

(43:58):
lot of our creativity that we can look at, like
a smear on the wall. We can look at a
cloud in the sky and we can we can we
can lean into a version of it that's not there.
We can make we can apply some sort of logic
to it and and create fantasy. And I think that,
I mean, that's I feel like, easily the far more

(44:18):
sensible way of understanding any kind of sense that seems
to come out of reverse speech. I'm extremely skeptical of
the notion that meaningful reverse speech would simply emerge from
traditional speech UM, as well as the idea that meaningful
information could then be understood by our brain even on
like a subliminal level like mad Dog and God damn,

(44:41):
sorry to have to curse again, but this is the
one of the historical examples. UM. These ideas are maybe
not completely unconnected from each other. Um, but they're also
like there's not really a strong meaningful connection either, Like
I'm not sure what the argument would be between those
two were. And it's funny too because and then the

(45:03):
argument is, oh, but only in English, you know, because
these words, let's say we say them in French instead,
the two words will not be the same two words
forward and backwards. You won't you won't be the same
message no matter what it's. It's basically impossible. So so no,
you know, it's like when people make arguments about um,
oh great predictions followed through like the Mayan calendar or something,

(45:26):
It's like, yeah, but they didn't use like leap days
like we do you know, like what time zone were
they using? Like like like these things don't line up,
like like different cultures have different um ways to kind
of like uh parcel out our lives, and they don't
match up across culturally. So so you can't just say
something is a universal truth. It's just like, well, maybe

(45:48):
that only works in English for me. When I have
the words written down, and uh, I was looking at
a couple of sources on this, you cat a little
more depth in it, uh In a R Vokey and J. D.
Reid suggested that some information might pass through when you
were when you were reversing using reversed audio, but they

(46:13):
were also very firm on the matter being misrepresented in
the media. Uh In this in and one of their papers,
they write, quote, is there any evidence to warrant assertations
that such such messages affect our behavior across a wide
variety of tasks? We were unable to find any evidence
to support such a claim. Secondarily, we present evidence to

(46:34):
suggest that the apparent presence of backward messages in popular
music is a function more of active construction on the
part of the perceiver than of the existence of the
messages themselves. Right. It was like a raw shack test. Yeah, yeah,
And and this I think is extremely telling to at
two thousand one study by Kriner, Altis and Voss found

(46:55):
that quote no priming effect was found for backwards messages,
although there were significant priming for forward messages. The results
are not consistent with an effect of reverse speech on
word processing. And I think that's this is really key,
because we know that priming works with forward with normal language,
that I can say something to you and I can

(47:17):
prime you for something and the effects of that priming
is measurable through experimentation. So if if if something was
to come through via reversed audio through back masking, it
would have an effect on priming, and we would be
able to measure that. And there's nothing to measure because

(47:37):
it doesn't work. It doesn't do that. Now that being said,
there there's still plenty of fun examples of back masking
in in music. One that that came up for me
and this is another example of the song that I've
heard many times, but I did not really think about
the back masking in it because I'm just so used
to hearing this technique. It's cool, but I don't give

(47:57):
it a lot of second thought or even wonder what's
being reversed. But there's a there's a Great Boards of
Canada album Geogatti, and there's a track titled you Could
Feel the Sky, and there's definitely some back mask audio
in there, and it may be reverse. It seems like
it's likely a reversal of a clip from I think

(48:20):
a documentary on paganism that says the God with horns,
and I guess this is maybe just kind of a
cheeky nod to backmasking. History. Uh and and some of
the you know, the Satanic panic ideas, which of course
Boards of Canada would have very much been familiar with.
And there's still so many examples too of people going
into business for themselves on back masking, playing stuff backwards,

(48:43):
sharing it on YouTube and saying, hey, clearly, if you
play this Black Sabbath lyric backwards, you hear I want
to be like Jesus. Stuff like that. I mean, there's
if you're just going into it purely for fun. Yes,
there's probably some some fun and amusing quote unquot discoveries
to make there, but just keep in mind that it's

(49:03):
just as much meaning as can be applied to spilling
some alphabet soup on the floor and seeing how many
words are spelled outs you know exactly. That can be fun,
but there's no meeting there. I thought it was put
really well in a piece and salon written by Eric Davis.
This piece was title what Exactly lyrics within the background
rooves of Stairway to Heaven quote. Soon, backmasking became the

(49:26):
Satanic panic du jour, giving paranoid Christians technological proof that
rock bands like Queen Kiss and Sticks. And then there's
an exclamation point in partheses did indeed play the devil's music.
While most people Christian or otherwise found all this rather silly,
these fears did reflect more pervasive fears that the media

(49:47):
had become a subliminal master of puppets, fears that would
themselves come to inspire some nineteen eighties metal and I
think this this one might have also been the paper
to point out that you also get these ridiculous images
and ridiculous footage of of of the some of the
provocateurs of Satanic panic, some of the the individuals that

(50:10):
were making these accusations messing around with record players and
playing stuff backwards and just really gazing hard and deep
and trying to find evidence of Satan in the reversed audio. Hey,
you know, everyone needs a hobby. I'm glad they're having fun.
Good for them. How about you, sef, Do you have
any any favorite examples of bat masking? You know, yeah,
oh yeah, yeah. I have one that I absolutely love,

(50:32):
not only because I think it's a fun example of,
you know, kind of how this can influence the songs
writing and kind of create a finished product, but also
just because I think it's a lovely song off of
a wonderful album by one of my favorite bands. Here's
an example. Uh, this is off of radio Heads two
thousand and one album Amnesiac. There's a very alien sounding

(50:53):
song called like Spinning Plates. It sounds so odd because
it originally started off as a song called I Will,
which is very funny because radio had eventually actually finished
that song and released it on a later album. But
enough about that. They were trying to record this song
during this recording session called I Will, and they just
couldn't get it to work. They were just messing around

(51:14):
with it, doing whatever, and at one point they decided
to play it backwards and they're like, yeah, that's it.
That's that's the album I want to hear. So they
had this, uh, this instrumental for this song backwards, and
the like, this is good, this is good, and so
so Tomy York, the lead singer. He created a new
vocal melody to go over it. But when you when
you played the forward vocal melody over the backwards song,

(51:35):
it just didn't quite line up. It just didn't sound right.
They didn't mesh together. So what he decided to do
instead was to phonetically take the words he wanted to say,
reverse them and then sing it backwards. He was obviously
singing forward in real time, but he's singing the backwards
result of what he wanted. So when he reversed it,

(51:59):
it would sound like forward words. So I'll say that
in a more succinct way. Tom York made up new
words that were phonetically the backwards version of his new
forward vocals, and then reverse the recording, creating lyrics that
sounded forward in the final song but are actually being reversed.

(52:21):
A very similar system was used in the TV show
Twin Peaks for the character the Man from Another Place
a k a. The Arm. He's the guy that's like,
you know sometimes my arms been back. You know that
that you like will come back in style? That guy
that that's very similar system. Yeah. But but as as
we'll point out, just like all this discussion we've been having,

(52:42):
that character of the Man from Another Place from Twin Peaks,
he always had subtitles because would you really be able
to understand what he was saying backwards if there weren't
subtitles there. I don't know. That's a that's a great point,
and it's a key point. Now. I love Radiohead and
and I love Tom York's um vocals. Tom new York's
vocals almost seemed like the perfect vocals to use in

(53:05):
an experiment of reverse or because I don't know. Sometimes
I feel like I there's certain vocalists whose voices I
I think of more as a musical instrument, like a
pure instrument, as opposed to a deliverer of actual linguistic information.
And I don't mean that as like a slam on them, um,
And it doesn't even necessarily mean that I can't understand

(53:27):
what they're saying. I mean sometimes I think of people
like um, like Maynard from Tool. You know, It's like
I can understand the words he's saying, but I'm not
really engaging with what he's saying on a lyrical level.
It's more about like the pure sound experience. And I
feel like that's that's what I have with Tom York. Well,
if you look at like the kind of the hallmarks
of reversed audio and what's really changing. Uh, The big key,

(53:50):
the thing that we cannot create with forward sounds and
can only be created backwards is when anything percussive occurs,
it goes and like a big sound at the beginning
and then it trails off very quickly. So when you
hear that backwards, especially, think about something like the sound
of like a drum being played backwards. It's like which,

(54:10):
which is a very iconic backwards sound. I suppose, you know,
I'm the one who edits these episodes. I could just
put in a reverse sound there, but no, no, no,
I like making with my mouth instead. But but yeah,
I think that's a big part of it. And Tom
York has a very vowel heavy, very floaty, ethereal singing style,
a lot lots of oos and os and moaning and

(54:33):
kind of like soft sounds. So because of that, forwards
and backwards doesn't affect it too much. You know, he's
not a percussive, you know, singer, and the percussion is
really what signifies, oh, something's backwards here. So huh, all right, everybody,
that's gonna have to be side A and you're gonna
have to flip it over for side b Uh. We

(54:54):
ended up reaching the point where we're gonna have to
cut this one in half, but we'll be back in
the next episode. Stuff to blow your mind seth Will
and I will continue this discussion and we'll get more
into physical media, we're start we're we'll start talking about
essentially enter the labyrinth of Vinyl records. In the meantime,
I'll just remind everybody that core episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind published on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the

(55:16):
Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed Monday's we do
listener mail. Wednesday's we do a short form artifact or
monster effect. On on on Fridays we do Weird how Cinema.
That's our time to set aside most serious concerns and
just talk about a weird film. By the time you're
listening to this, I think Joe is actually back, so uh,
we should be welcoming Joe back on some episodes in

(55:37):
the very near future. But we recorded these episodes ahead
of time. And as always, thanks to Seth Nicholas Johnson
for not only co hosting but of course producing Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. And if you want to reach
out to any of us, if you have feedback on
this episode of thoughts about reversed music and so forth,
will you can email us at contact. It's Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind

(56:05):
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