Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb. In today's vault episode for you,
Speaker 1: because it is Saturday, we have a classic episode. This
Speaker 1: is Play the Record Backwards Part one. It originally published
Speaker 1: eleven nine, twenty twenty two. This is one that I
Speaker 1: did with the former producer Seth Nicholas Johnson back during
Speaker 1: Joe's parental leave. So I hope you enjoy part one
Speaker 1: of this series.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: Seth is of course the producer of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind, but he also co hosts the music podcast
Speaker 1: Rusty Needles Record Club. Today's episode is going to be
Speaker 1: something of a crossover episode because we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about Stuff to Blow your Mind type stuff, but
Speaker 1: this one is going to veer directly into vinyl record
Speaker 1: territory for I think a large a large portion of
Speaker 1: the episode, and especially when you get into that area,
Speaker 1: I'm really going to have to defer to you, Seth,
Speaker 1: being the master of records that you are, and with
Speaker 1: myself being someone who was told from an early age
Speaker 1: not to touch records, yes, and being an obedient child,
Speaker 1: I obeyed everyone on that and I have virtually not
Speaker 1: touched any vinyl my entire life, because that's what grown
Speaker 1: ups are supposed to do.
Speaker 3: You know, it's not actually a bad rule to make
Speaker 3: for children, because you know, they are very delicate. And
Speaker 3: not only do I manufacture vinyl on my own, which
Speaker 3: has taught me a lot about it, but also I
Speaker 3: run a record label, so I've had it pressed at
Speaker 3: vinyl factories, and I'm a big vinyl collector on my own,
Speaker 3: and even me very familiar with what you should and
Speaker 3: shouldn't touch. Basically, only touch the rim and the label,
Speaker 3: never touch the grooves. Even I just because I'm a
Speaker 3: human being, I'll be clumsy and drop something and it'll
Speaker 3: like scratch against an edge and like, well that's ruined forever,
Speaker 3: you know, So I can't imagine in trusting that to
Speaker 3: a child. You know, That's why children's records are always
Speaker 3: just scratched into oblivion. So so you know, I understand,
Speaker 3: and I also understand why even adults have are hesitance
Speaker 3: to jump into that world.
Speaker 1: But I also see the attraction of it. Obviously. I
Speaker 1: mean on Weird House Cinema episodes are always pointing out
Speaker 1: which movies score has been re released in some sort
Speaker 1: of strange, ultra rare vinyl release, and it's often beautiful
Speaker 1: just from a packaging standpoint, but also when you get
Speaker 1: down to the details of the record pressing, like, I
Speaker 1: see the appeal of it. So it's not for lack
Speaker 1: of occasionally thinking, hey I could, I could start getting
Speaker 1: into vinyl. But yeah, just from an early age, I
Speaker 1: was told shouldn't touch that, and I agree.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's wonderful for forcing yourself to be actually
Speaker 3: involved in what you're consuming musically, that's my favorite part
Speaker 3: about vinyl. Sure, the sound quality is better, there's no
Speaker 3: getting around that. It is better. But in addition to that,
Speaker 3: I love that I need to put the record on
Speaker 3: the little turntable, I need to turn on my stereo,
Speaker 3: got to put the needle in the groove, I need
Speaker 3: to wait fifteen to thirty minutes, flip it over, put
Speaker 3: it back on the other side. You know, like I
Speaker 3: have an active interest in what I'm listening to, and
Speaker 3: therefore it makes me appreciate it more. It's just like
Speaker 3: eating sunflower seeds. You know, cracking open the shells is
Speaker 3: half the fun.
Speaker 1: You know. Okay, so you get that Tack Kyle experience
Speaker 1: with it.
Speaker 3: It's not just a passive series of zeros and ones
Speaker 3: being pre chosen by an algorithm. I chose this record,
Speaker 3: I'm putting it on. I'm making these noises happen in
Speaker 3: my own small contribution way.
Speaker 1: So in this episode, we're going to be talking in
Speaker 1: general about things hidden in music. You might think of
Speaker 1: them as easter eggs or any other number of terms.
Speaker 1: You might use hidden messages if you'd rather. And we'll
Speaker 1: also be talking about accusations and panics associated with some
Speaker 1: of these techniques, the psychology involved, and specific examples from
Speaker 1: music history.
Speaker 3: And as we explain these various record based techniques, I
Speaker 3: will give some real world examples of them that you
Speaker 3: can find in your local record store and that hey,
Speaker 3: I think you should listen to, because I think every
Speaker 3: example I give is something that I'm like, Yes, I
Speaker 3: recommend this, go check it out.
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, And some of these examples are going to
Speaker 1: come up are things that were mentioned in papers I'll
Speaker 1: be citing, but they're obviously ones In many cases you
Speaker 1: were very familiar with and you can perhaps give a
Speaker 1: little more background on right. All right, So the first
Speaker 1: stop is going to take us back before musical recording
Speaker 1: was possible, or at least to a time when the
Speaker 1: main way to record music was at least via media
Speaker 1: was to put it on paper, was to write down
Speaker 1: the music, and even then a certain amount of musical
Speaker 1: encoding is possible. So we have to be reminded that
Speaker 1: music is information. So it shouldn't come as a surprise
Speaker 1: that hidden information can be present in music in ways
Speaker 1: that pre date analog or digital media. Not getting into
Speaker 1: what's possible with language itself, because obviously, you know any
Speaker 1: given song's lyrics in any given language, there's going to
Speaker 1: be enough complexity there that you can hide things that
Speaker 1: you can sort of get across points Subliminally. You can
Speaker 1: use metaphors. I mean, all the weapons of language are
Speaker 1: at your disposal if you at all know how to
Speaker 1: use them when you're crafting lyrics. But beyond that, we
Speaker 1: can certainly look at examples of musical cryptograms, because basically
Speaker 1: musical symbols and musical notes can and have been used
Speaker 1: in substitution ciphers. And we've talked about substitution ciphers on
Speaker 1: pasted up of stuff to blow your mind. When musical
Speaker 1: theorists in the West began to assign letter names to notes,
Speaker 1: steering I believe the ninth century CE, it also became
Speaker 1: possible to turn things around. Though it wasn't until I
Speaker 1: believe the Romantic period and beyond that that this was
Speaker 1: really explored. So you might be wondering, well, okay, what
Speaker 1: are you talking about here with the obviously we have notes,
Speaker 1: we have an play, an a play, A B natural,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And this is where we see a great
Speaker 1: example of this, and this is one that I mentioned
Speaker 1: a number of you're familiar with. The famed Baroque composer
Speaker 1: Johann Sebastian Bach, who lived sixteen eighty five through seventeen fifty,
Speaker 1: would employ what we call the Bach motif. So that's
Speaker 1: a B flat an A A C and then a
Speaker 1: B natural. Now you might say, well, well that's a
Speaker 1: B A C B that's meaningless. Well, in German, a
Speaker 1: B flat is B and a B natural is H,
Speaker 1: thus spelling out Bach.
Speaker 3: Clever.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe once you've it's been explained, maybe a little
Speaker 1: too obvious, but but yeah, there it's an example where
Speaker 1: he decided to using the system in place to label
Speaker 1: these different sounds, to then turn it around and write
Speaker 1: his no own name in the music itself. And there
Speaker 1: are numerous other examples of this from other composers.
Speaker 3: You know, I've actually looked this up before because it
Speaker 3: is it's a fun idea to communicate with the sounds
Speaker 3: of notes. In fact, I remember there was a gosh
Speaker 3: I believe it was a scene in the Paul Thomas
Speaker 3: Anderson film Magnolia where they're on like a game show
Speaker 3: and these are like what these are things you'll bring
Speaker 3: to a picnic and they'll just play notes and they'll
Speaker 3: like spell out the words, so like egg, I'll bring
Speaker 3: an egg, that kind of thing, you know, like it's
Speaker 3: it's something you can do and it's fun, it's puzzley,
Speaker 3: it's it's good times. So I've looked this up in
Speaker 3: the past. There are approximately, especially if you include the
Speaker 3: h as a part of it, around two hundred words
Speaker 3: that you can spell using just musical notes. You know,
Speaker 3: things like cabbage head. You know, like these things, these
Speaker 3: things are possible, they're a part of that language. So
Speaker 3: I think it would be difficult, but I bet you
Speaker 3: could form a message you could form sentences and you know,
Speaker 3: we'll talk more about more examples right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, because you're essentially talking about music
Speaker 1: obsessed individuals, total music nerds in different ages, just eventually
Speaker 1: getting in there and just experimenting with what they could do,
Speaker 1: be it something that was about creating new sound, elevating
Speaker 1: the art, etc. Or just having a laugh, and that's
Speaker 1: those two ideas seem to run throughout the history of
Speaker 1: this kind of hidden messages in music activity. There are
Speaker 1: also older examples of musical cryptograms, including the work of
Speaker 1: Renaissance musician Jocquin de Prez lived fourteen fifty five through
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty one. He was a French Flemish composer and
Speaker 1: he composed a particular work, this is Missa Hercules du Ferrari.
Speaker 1: It was for the Duke of Ferrara, and the music
Speaker 1: is derived from the musical letters in the Duke's name,
Speaker 1: a musical cryptogram that was later known as the Soghetto cavato.
Speaker 1: Another example, American occultist Paul Foster Case would create a
Speaker 1: cryptogram in the twentieth century that made use of esoteric
Speaker 1: symbols and concepts and if I understand what I was
Speaker 1: reading on it correctly. It used occult symbols Hebrew and
Speaker 1: Latin to translate a word into notes, though the usage
Speaker 1: here would be more ceremonial than anything. But one of
Speaker 1: several examples will be touching on that either is within
Speaker 1: the realm of the occult or we'll touch on examples
Speaker 1: later that are more in the area of sort of
Speaker 1: like foe occultism or accusations of occultism, etc.
Speaker 3: So those are all excellent examples, but let's give our
Speaker 3: audience one more that's a bit more modern something. Then
Speaker 3: they can go find a record of right now, the
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy seven album Let There Be Rock by ACDC.
Speaker 3: They close with a song called a Whole Lot of
Speaker 3: Rosie where the primary guitar riff goes aca daca or akkadaka,
Speaker 3: which is acdc's nickname in their home country of Australia.
Speaker 1: Ah, that's impressive. I had no idea about that, huh,
Speaker 1: so John Sebastian Bach. Also, the members of ACDC all
Speaker 1: all the same brain when it comes to coding the
Speaker 1: songs here.
Speaker 3: Yes, shoulder to shoulder.
Speaker 1: So there are just a few brief examples to demonstrate
Speaker 1: what is It was possible even before analog and digital
Speaker 1: media becomes involved in the scenario. But at this point
Speaker 1: let's move on to some more analog examples. So the
Speaker 1: first thing we're going to look at with actual recorded
Speaker 1: audio is something that I'm sure many, if not most,
Speaker 1: of you are familiar with at this point, either by
Speaker 1: virtue of various panics over popular music, especially satanic panic,
Speaker 1: and its reverberations through media from everything from horror movies
Speaker 1: to supernatural television shows and so forth. But also it
Speaker 1: impacts actual record an actual recording practice, an actual production practice,
Speaker 1: a technique known as back masking.
Speaker 3: So before we.
Speaker 1: Get into any actual examples of back masking or allegations
Speaker 1: of back masking, and this is where it gets, it
Speaker 1: gets very weird because it seems like on the surface
Speaker 1: you would think, well, either you're doing it or you're
Speaker 1: not doing it, and if you're doing it, truly it's provable.
Speaker 1: But it gets a little more ambiguous than that. So
Speaker 1: in simple terms, this is reversing audio, especially recordings of
Speaker 1: human speech, playing it backwards in a recording. In many cases,
Speaker 1: you know you know it when you hear it. Basic
Speaker 1: backward speech, which is also sometimes utilized in media for
Speaker 1: like alien words or arcane spells and so forth. A
Speaker 1: lot of times it's used for creepy effects. And I
Speaker 1: think we all we you know it when you hear it.
Speaker 1: You can hear this this sound effect, and it's it's
Speaker 1: people speaking backwards. That's what it is.
Speaker 3: It's almost unfortunate that we're all so familiar with it
Speaker 3: at this point, because back in the old days, before
Speaker 3: you know, before we all walked around with computers in
Speaker 3: our pockets and we all have the ability to record
Speaker 3: ourselves whenever we wanted, it must have truly sounded foreign.
Speaker 3: You know. It's here audio played backwards, and it's been like, wow,
Speaker 3: what is that. I've never heard any creature make that
Speaker 3: noise before. And now when we hear it, we just go, oh,
Speaker 3: that's that's reversed audio. We know what it sounds like,
Speaker 3: you know, we know, we know the hallmarks of it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I guess with with actual reversed audio, they're
Speaker 1: like one of two things happens. It just sounds weird
Speaker 1: and cool and sounds like dark magic and so forth.
Speaker 1: And I think that's especially nowadays, that's how most of
Speaker 1: us hear it. But also the brain can't help but
Speaker 1: lean into it and sometimes try and hear things in it,
Speaker 1: and that gets into a whole other area. Now, the
Speaker 1: other side of the equation we mentioned allegations of back masking,
Speaker 1: erroneous back masking, arguments that especially dangerous seeming rock bands
Speaker 1: of previous decades, the idea that they were actually back
Speaker 1: masking in a way so that what sounds like just
Speaker 1: normal lyrics can be reversed and have a totally different meaning,
Speaker 1: usually one that is satanic.
Speaker 3: Or sometimes not. There's a great episode of The Simpsons
Speaker 3: where a joke is made that Paul McCartney snuck in
Speaker 3: a recipe for lentil soup into Maybe I'm Amazed. We
Speaker 3: have to play it backwards to hear it. And here's
Speaker 3: actually the really fun part. Over the closing credits of
Speaker 3: that episode of The Simpsons, they do play maybe I'm amazed.
Speaker 3: This is actually a famous episode. This is the one
Speaker 3: where Least becomes a vegetarian.
Speaker 1: This episode, that's a great episode.
Speaker 3: Yes, and so in that episode they do play maybe
Speaker 3: I'm Amazed over the closing credits. And if you actually
Speaker 3: record the closing credits audio and reverse it, they really
Speaker 3: did insert a recipe for lentil soup into that song.
Speaker 3: It's wonderful.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I had no idea the real song only in
Speaker 3: the Simpsons episode Wow.
Speaker 1: So it shouldn't surprise anyone that this practice goes back
Speaker 1: pretty much as long as we've had the ability to
Speaker 1: record in playback speech. In fact, I was reading, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a book titled Language, Myths, Mysteries and Magic from
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, and there's an article in there I'm backmasking
Speaker 1: by Karen stoles Now, and the author points out that
Speaker 1: this actually goes all the way back to Thomas Edison
Speaker 1: around eighteen seventy seven, as the noted American inventor and
Speaker 1: businessman would experiment with playing music backwards. I think, notably
Speaker 1: a whistled version of Yankee Doodle Dandy, and this would
Speaker 1: have been used via tinfoil phonograph recordings. He observed that
Speaker 1: music quote is still melodious in many cases, and some
Speaker 1: of the strains are sweet and novel, but all together
Speaker 1: different from the song reproduced in the right way. And
Speaker 1: I think this is a realization that certainly someone like
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison was in a position to acknowledge and admire
Speaker 1: back then. And then there's kind of been a wave
Speaker 1: of it throughout audio history and certainly nowadays. I'd never
Speaker 1: really looked at this before, but if you go on
Speaker 1: like YouTube, you'll find so many examples of people taking
Speaker 1: music and reversing like whole albums, just to play it
Speaker 1: backwards and see what happens. Sometimes they have a specific
Speaker 1: thing they're going for, maybe they're after something in the lyrics,
Speaker 1: or it's one of the cases that we'll be touching
Speaker 1: on later on in this episode. But other times, especially
Speaker 1: with I saw the number of ambient albums, people just
Speaker 1: want to experience the album. I love both both the
Speaker 1: forwards and backwards.
Speaker 3: I've got another little recommendation to throw in here. Okay,
Speaker 3: So there is a wonderful musician and his name his
Speaker 3: real name is Dave Portner, but he goes by av Tair.
Speaker 3: Av Tair is most famously from the band Animal Collective,
Speaker 3: but he has a wonderful solo career as well. There
Speaker 3: was a time when he was married to one of
Speaker 3: the members of the band Moom and her name was
Speaker 3: Krea Brecken. Okay, so they released while they were married
Speaker 3: a collaborative album together called Pull Hair Rabbi All right, now,
Speaker 3: when this album first leaked back in the days when
Speaker 3: like leaking was a big issue. Folks would listen to
Speaker 3: it and they were like, oh, this is a bad leak.
Speaker 3: It sounds like the entire album is played backwards. Someone
Speaker 3: let me know when you get a real version of
Speaker 3: the leak. Well, av Tair himself came onto these boards
Speaker 3: and was like, no, no, that's the real version. When
Speaker 3: he and his wife had finished recording their album, they decided,
Speaker 3: you know, the entire album sounds better if you play
Speaker 3: it backwards. So what became a pretty straightforward folk album
Speaker 3: became a pretty foreign sounding backwards album and it's wonderful.
Speaker 3: It's called pull Hair Rubbi. I highly recommend it, and
Speaker 3: it sounds almost instrumental. It sounds very foreign, and it
Speaker 3: sounds very strange because once they did reverse it initially
Speaker 3: and they decided, yes, this whole album just will be
Speaker 3: backwards versions of every single song, then they did start
Speaker 3: leaning into that. They made special decisions that really highlighted
Speaker 3: those choices, and it worked out really well. Genuinely, it's
Speaker 3: a wonderful album. I think people should.
Speaker 1: Listen to it on a very I guess, kind of
Speaker 1: simple level. It reminds me a lot of what's going
Speaker 1: on with AI and creativity nowadays, be it with text
Speaker 1: or visuals, where you have a level of human creativity
Speaker 1: that's going into the machine, it's getting spat out in
Speaker 1: some form, and then there's going to be a certain
Speaker 1: amount of tweaking, either after tweaking to the resulting material
Speaker 1: or then going back and seeing, Okay, now I see
Speaker 1: what the technology does to what I started with. What
Speaker 1: can I do to optimally change the results and make
Speaker 1: it even more in line with what I'm trying to create.
Speaker 3: I think this has been something that's an element of
Speaker 3: creativity the people have used forever, which is just taking
Speaker 3: some of the decisions out of the hands of the
Speaker 3: creator to help influence something else, whether it be like
Speaker 3: those you know, those like cut up practices where you're
Speaker 3: trying to write lyrics, so you write little words, put
Speaker 3: them in a hat and pull them out one by one,
Speaker 3: or you know those famous Brian Eno cards where there's
Speaker 3: like difference like prompts written on each card that you
Speaker 3: pull out, and that's supposed to help you with your
Speaker 3: production process. Like you know, there's lots of examples of this,
Speaker 3: and yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think
Speaker 3: AI and intentional reversing just takes a few of those
Speaker 3: decisions out of the hands of the artist.
Speaker 1: Now stalls Now also shares another example from Edison. Edison
Speaker 1: and his colleagues were apparently also fond of making recordings
Speaker 1: of someone saying mad dog and playing it backwards so
Speaker 1: that it sounded like God damn. And this was not
Speaker 1: any kind of early satanic record recording. This was apparently
Speaker 1: just pure novelty. They just observed that this was the
Speaker 1: case and found it amusing. But it touches on something
Speaker 1: that will We'll keep coming back to the idea that
Speaker 1: sometimes when you take spoken language and you reverse it,
Speaker 1: it can sound like other words in that language. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and then then there's a lot of psychological layering to
Speaker 1: put on top of that. But we'll get to that now. Eventually,
Speaker 1: real to real tapes came along, this would have in
Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, and it became increasingly easy for audio
Speaker 1: lovers to experiment with the medium. So, for instance, French
Speaker 1: composer Pierre Schaeffer lived nineteen ten through nineteen ninety five
Speaker 1: experimented with t looping, sampling and back masking, and the
Speaker 1: use of back masking would then increase among avant garde
Speaker 1: musicians during the nineteen fifties, according to Stassnow, and certainly
Speaker 1: I think a lot of you out there can think
Speaker 1: of various recording artists who use some of these tools,
Speaker 1: tape loops especially. There are a lot of ambient recording
Speaker 1: artists that I can think of that make use of this,
Speaker 1: But it comes down to just manipulating the recorded data
Speaker 1: at heart. Now, in the history of back masking, it's
Speaker 1: impossible to talk about all this without touching on the Beatles.
Speaker 1: And it's not just because all of the Beatles are
Speaker 1: popular and are an easy band to source for all this.
Speaker 1: Like that, they really were the ones that are credited
Speaker 1: with sort of bringing back masking into the mainstream, both
Speaker 1: for good and kind of also for bad, for the
Speaker 1: you know, leaning into the whole panic area. So to
Speaker 1: be clear, though, all major and serious accounts, which which
Speaker 1: stalls Now discusses in their paper, seem to drive on
Speaker 1: the Beatles engaged in back masking purely for novelty's sake.
Speaker 1: This entails large. I think The main examples here three
Speaker 1: tracks off of the legendary nineteen sixty six album Revolver
Speaker 1: that would be I'm Only Sleeping Tomorrow never Knows. But
Speaker 1: then also the single Rain, which wasn't on that album
Speaker 1: but came out of the same recordings. So specifically, on
Speaker 1: these I'm Only Sleeping you have a back masked lead
Speaker 1: guitar part by George Harrison. So George Harrison played it
Speaker 1: one way. When they were tinkering around and figuring out,
Speaker 1: you know, how they're putting all this together, they said, hey,
Speaker 1: we like it better in reverse. Let's use it that way.
Speaker 1: It helps create this kind of dreamlike, you know, psychedelic sound.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure just novelty variety and probably just purely
Speaker 3: aesthetics is just what dictated these decisions for them. I mean,
Speaker 3: and sure maybybe part of it. Was like, hey, it'll
Speaker 3: be funny if people try to reverse these things because
Speaker 3: they sound backwards, But I bet that wasn't really the
Speaker 3: primary thoughts. I'm sure aesthetics were the first and foremost
Speaker 3: decision maker there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen it mentioned that the John Lennon and
Speaker 1: producer George Martin both kind of took credit for the discovery,
Speaker 1: but both in kind of casual ways, Like I think
Speaker 1: George Martin was more along. It was more along the
Speaker 1: lines of like, yeah, we were experimenting and this sounded good,
Speaker 1: and John Lennon was more likely to say, well, I
Speaker 1: was really high at the time and I kind of
Speaker 1: discovered it either way, though Yeah Tomorrow Never Knows also
Speaker 1: has backwards guitar on it, and then Rain stands out
Speaker 1: a little bit because it features backward vocals. So these
Speaker 1: are popular and I guess somewhat obvious examples of backmasking
Speaker 1: in the biggest band in the world. And so of
Speaker 1: course this leads to greater scrutiny, great greater awareness of
Speaker 1: the technique. And this is going to mean that that
Speaker 1: later on people were looking at subsequent Beatles albums and saying, well,
Speaker 1: I wonder what's forwards, but what's backwards? Are they using
Speaker 1: this again? And this ends up this ends up leading
Speaker 1: to a lot of speculation from some of the more
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, conspiracy minded fans about what may
Speaker 1: be hidden in subsequent albums. Those stalls now writes in
Speaker 1: their paper quote, there were no hidden messages until the
Speaker 1: fans and fanatics went looking for them. And so from
Speaker 1: here we begin to veer into this area of accusations
Speaker 1: of back masking and getting into urban legends about songs
Speaker 1: like Revolution nine off of nineteen sixty eight's The White Album.
Speaker 1: If this is something I wasn't super familiar with, but
Speaker 1: there's a voice saying number nine, number nine, number nine,
Speaker 1: and the legend goes that if you reverse that, you
Speaker 1: hear turn me on dead Man, and you can. You
Speaker 1: can find examples of this on I think just the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia page for the White Album or for Revolution number nine,
Speaker 1: and you can hear it. I was listening to it
Speaker 1: just the other day, and I have to say I
Speaker 1: did not find it particularly convincing. I feel like you
Speaker 1: really have to want to hear turn me on dead Man,
Speaker 1: And then you get into that area where it's like,
Speaker 1: if this is the hidden message, why is the hidden message?
Speaker 1: Like so like clunky.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think you can say that about something
Speaker 3: of that I think you're coming to, which is all
Speaker 3: of the Paul is Dead clueses that are out there.
Speaker 3: This was taken as one of those, as a Oh,
Speaker 3: this is just an indicator if folks don't know, there's
Speaker 3: a long held rumor slash conspiracy theory that is clearly
Speaker 3: very untrue, but people just like to talk about it
Speaker 3: that Paul died in a car crash early on in
Speaker 3: the Beatles' career, and then he was replaced by a
Speaker 3: Paul look alike at one point. It's obviously very untrue,
Speaker 3: but there are many examples that conspiracy theorists like to
Speaker 3: talk about, like, oh gosh, here here's one. For example,
Speaker 3: if you look at the cover of Abbey Road picture
Speaker 3: in your mind, you have the four Beetles walking across
Speaker 3: the road. They're all dressed in kind of interesting clothing,
Speaker 3: very distinct from one another. I'm going off the top
Speaker 3: of my head, but I think I can do this
Speaker 3: all the way. At the back you have George Harrison,
Speaker 3: who is dressed kind of like a working man, kind
Speaker 3: of like working man's clothes, denim, nothing fancy. In front
Speaker 3: of that, you have Ringo who's wearing like kind of
Speaker 3: a fancier suit and tie. Okay. In front of that
Speaker 3: you have Paul, also dressed, you know, pretty casually, and
Speaker 3: I think he's not wearing shoes all right, And then
Speaker 3: in front of him you have John Lennon, who is
Speaker 3: dressed all in white with long flowing hair, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera. So the message you were supposed to receive
Speaker 3: from that is that John Lennon was God and he
Speaker 3: was taking home the dead body of Paul McCartney. He
Speaker 3: wasn't wearing shoes because something to do with like being
Speaker 3: buried without your shoes on. It was something this one referenced.
Speaker 3: Ringo represented like the priest who was like burying and
Speaker 3: giving the eulogy, and George Harrison was representing the grave digger,
Speaker 3: the man actually burying Paul. And it's like, yeah, I guess,
Speaker 3: you know, like that's quite a stretch. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of other things too, Like if you hold a mirror
Speaker 3: up to the bass drum on the cover of Sergeant
Speaker 3: Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it allegedly like gives you
Speaker 3: the date that Paul died. And like if you look
Speaker 3: at like the pictures on the cover of Let It Be,
Speaker 3: I think Paul's is the only one with like a
Speaker 3: red background and everyone else's is white or something like that.
Speaker 3: Like there's all these little things and they're all meaningless.
Speaker 3: But this was another one to turn me on dead Man.
Speaker 3: It's I don't know, I don't know why someone could
Speaker 3: put so much stock in this, but I suppose it's fun,
Speaker 3: you know, just to look for clues and hints and stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we have to remember this is in
Speaker 1: the wake of Beatlemania, and we could think of it
Speaker 1: as like a heretical strain of Beatlemania that began to
Speaker 1: attach itself to these various cryptic details in either the
Speaker 1: you know, the advanced production design of the music or
Speaker 1: the advanced record design of you know, illustration work and
Speaker 1: graphic design on the albums. There's plenty to sort of
Speaker 1: latch onto in both of these and some of one
Speaker 1: of those things, I guess you look at a lot
Speaker 1: of conspiracy thinking some of this may have began for fun,
Speaker 1: it's just as an amusement, but then it can kind
Speaker 1: of take on an energy of its own, and you
Speaker 1: begin to wonder to what extent are people truly buying
Speaker 1: into this idea that Paul is dead and has been
Speaker 1: replaced by a look alike. And obviously the most rational
Speaker 1: thing you would do if you were perpetrating this kind
Speaker 1: of conspiracy was leave a lot of clues for it
Speaker 1: in your subsequent album output. Absolutely so, anyway, Paul McCartney
Speaker 1: was not dead then, and as of this recordings still alive.
Speaker 1: Actually now, it is worth noting that a day in
Speaker 1: the life off of Sergeant Pepper's Only Hearts Club Band,
Speaker 1: which will come back to again that it does contain
Speaker 1: some sounds that are just for dogs. Though there's also
Speaker 1: the allegation that a reverse section at the end of
Speaker 1: the song can be reversed into something crude, but according
Speaker 1: to Martin, this is all just gibberish reverse. They just
Speaker 1: recorded a lot of gibberish and then reversed it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, you can hear nearly anything in anything.
Speaker 3: I remember personally. I had a copy of Crosby, Stills
Speaker 3: and Nash Deja Vus, and when I was younger, I
Speaker 3: played the title track backwards because why not, you know,
Speaker 3: I had a record player, why not play it backwards?
Speaker 3: And there was a section where I swore, my little
Speaker 3: teenage brain, I swore that they said you cannot hide,
Speaker 3: hide amongst them. Okay. So I was hanging out at
Speaker 3: a friend of mine's house and I heard her her
Speaker 3: I think it was her stepfather, was in the other
Speaker 3: room playing this record out loud, and I was like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, I know a hidden message in this
Speaker 3: record that if if you play it backwards, that it
Speaker 3: says you cannot hide. Hide, amongst them, and she's like, oh,
Speaker 3: go to the go tell. I'm like, okay, this is
Speaker 3: gonna be great. So I go to this adult little
Speaker 3: teenage boy and I'm like, you know, if you play
Speaker 3: this song backwards, you can hear, you can hear hidden messages,
Speaker 3: you can hear, you cannot hide hide amongst them. And
Speaker 3: he goes. He stares me for a while, cocks his head.
Speaker 3: He's just like, you smoke a lot of pot, do
Speaker 3: you No, I'm just a music lover. I love playing
Speaker 3: my records backwards. And yeah, didn't. I didn't get the
Speaker 3: reaction I was hoping for, which was awe and praise
Speaker 3: and a standing ovation.
Speaker 1: But oh well, this is a great time for me
Speaker 1: to ask this though, because I guess this is something
Speaker 1: that should be obvious to people who use record players.
Speaker 1: But I didn't even think about this. But every record
Speaker 1: player gives you the ability to play both forward and backwards?
Speaker 1: Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Almost? Almost some of them do it deliberately, Like there
Speaker 3: are record players that I own that literally have a
Speaker 3: switch that you can go from forwards to backwards. And
Speaker 3: that's if you have a quote unquote like fancy record player,
Speaker 3: that button will be the and that's that's a very
Speaker 3: useful thing to have, especially we're trying to like cue
Speaker 3: up an exact moment in a song, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3: So yeah, so that that is a feature that many
Speaker 3: record players have a literal reverse button, but on the
Speaker 3: less expensive ones, And this is the way I used
Speaker 3: to do it when I was younger. You would turn
Speaker 3: off the belt that that drives the actual turning of
Speaker 3: the record, and you would but you would leave the
Speaker 3: speaker on and you would manually move your hand backwards,
Speaker 3: pushing the record in reverse, which makes it sound even
Speaker 3: creepier because it's not even like, you know, at like
Speaker 3: a regular pace. It's got like this like human lurch
Speaker 3: to it's you know. So, but I also know that
Speaker 3: there are record players that just will not go in reverse,
Speaker 3: no matter if you push them, you'll just end up
Speaker 3: breaking them. So yeah, there's different kinds, but some actually
Speaker 3: just have a button that plays it in reverse.
Speaker 1: Interesting, well, this is all telling because it does sound,
Speaker 1: from what you're saying, like just the basic vinyl record
Speaker 1: scenario would sort of put the tools in the average
Speaker 1: music fans hands to sort of go in and investigate
Speaker 1: for themselves, right and find things potentially or confirm things
Speaker 1: that they heard they might.
Speaker 3: Find Yeah exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So again. By most accounts, back maasking by the Beatles
Speaker 1: was generally more about novelty and dumb jokes, but that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that occult back masking didn't take place. According
Speaker 1: to Jonathan Weinel, Darryl Griffiths, and Stuart Cunningham in twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen's Easter Eggs, Hidden Tracks and Messages in Musical Mediums,
Speaker 1: occultist Aleister Crowley encouraged practitioners to engage backwards thinking by
Speaker 1: listening to recordings backwards. And while I think this sounds
Speaker 1: kind of silly, this notion and the ripples of this
Speaker 1: notion certainly influence the eventual place of backtracking in Satanic panic.
Speaker 1: Satanic Panic, of course, this is something that we've touched
Speaker 1: on in the show before. This was a moral panic,
Speaker 1: mostly in the United States and then also in the
Speaker 1: UK and parts of Europe here in the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: though its reverberations in subsequent years and subsequent decades can
Speaker 1: be found in different parts of the world and also
Speaker 1: in different sort of communities and certainly faith communities as well.
Speaker 1: Basically just whips everyone into a frenzy over the idea
Speaker 1: that something that had never really existed in the world,
Speaker 1: that is, the organized worship of Satan, was in engaging
Speaker 1: in covert means of corrupting the youth of the world,
Speaker 1: as well as ritually torturing and murdering children. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's much more one could say about satantic panic in
Speaker 1: its awfulness and also like the real cost of it
Speaker 1: to actual human beings. There's also a lot to be
Speaker 1: said into how it ends up impacting media, how it
Speaker 1: impacts music and horror and so forth. But backmasking comes
Speaker 1: into play as a part of all of this as well,
Speaker 1: because you had allegations that scary metal bands and even
Speaker 1: bands that we might not think of today as being scary,
Speaker 1: we're using backmasking to corrupt listeners with incantations of devil, magic,
Speaker 1: drugs and more.
Speaker 3: Which this era is so baffling to me because I suppose,
Speaker 3: if you're the kind of person that wants to believe
Speaker 3: in this organized worship of Satan that's happening right under
Speaker 3: your nose, any of your neighbors could be a Satan worshiper.
Speaker 3: I suppose you're also the same kind of person that's
Speaker 3: going to believe that a backwards incantation can do something
Speaker 3: have some effects in the real world. So I don't know.
Speaker 3: I just hope for the practical minds of most people
Speaker 3: to go, wait, there's a backward spell on this. Oh well,
Speaker 3: good things. Spells don't work, so who cares? You know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it ultimately raises a bunch of ridiculous questions when
Speaker 1: you start analyzing it with a logical mind. But and
Speaker 1: then some of them too. It just it just made
Speaker 1: absolutely no sense, or it makes no sense to me.
Speaker 1: For example, it was alleged at one point that acdc's
Speaker 1: Highway to Hell can hained back masked lyrics, and when
Speaker 1: asked about this, Angus Young refuted it by saying, hey, well,
Speaker 1: there's nothing subliminal about the actual lyrics to the song.
Speaker 1: Part of the lyrics are hey, Satan paying my dues
Speaker 1: playing in a rocking band? Like what? Like? Why do
Speaker 1: you need to also hide the Satanism if you're basically
Speaker 1: saying praise Satan right there in.
Speaker 3: The lyrics, I don't get it.
Speaker 1: And there were these were, but these were real accusations
Speaker 1: with potentially real consequences for bands and record companies at
Speaker 1: the time. For instance, one accusation that picked up steam
Speaker 1: among evangelicals, especially at the time, And this is one
Speaker 1: that I imagine a lot of you have heard, and
Speaker 1: there are examples of this. You can pull up on
Speaker 1: Wikipedia for the entry for this song. But led Zeppelin
Speaker 1: Stairway to Heaven classic rock song, like it's it's a
Speaker 1: song that I think is great, but I couldn't tell
Speaker 1: you because I've heard it too many times on the radio.
Speaker 1: So it's it's not my favorite led Zeppelin song because
Speaker 1: I've just heard it too many times. It would not
Speaker 1: like in the top ten for me. And it contains
Speaker 1: it does contain some actual lyrics that go as follows.
Speaker 1: If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed.
Speaker 1: Now I'm not entirely sure what that means, but that
Speaker 1: those are just part of the lyrics to Stairway to Heaven.
Speaker 1: And the accusation is that if you play this backwards,
Speaker 1: then you hear the words Here's to my sweet Satan,
Speaker 1: the one whose little path would make me sad, whose
Speaker 1: power is Satan. He'll give you, He'll give you six
Speaker 1: sixty six. There was a little tool shed where he
Speaker 1: made us suffer, sad, satan.
Speaker 3: Way too elaborate for backbasket, not a chance.
Speaker 1: I mean, after I read this, I listened to the
Speaker 1: example of it, and I mean, it is it is
Speaker 1: creepy to hear because you are hearing reverse language. You
Speaker 1: are hearing you are hearing something that sounds like satan.
Speaker 1: But then on the other hand, it's so ridiculous sounding,
Speaker 1: like what does this even mean? Like if I were
Speaker 1: to take this at face value, what is the tool
Speaker 1: shed doing for me in this scenario? Like nothing in
Speaker 1: this is really all that creepy compared to any actual
Speaker 1: satanic lyrics. Oh really, there are plenty of examples in
Speaker 1: led Zeppelin's lyrics that are, on the face, more shocking
Speaker 1: than what we have right here in the alleged back masking.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, and also I think certain words
Speaker 3: just when they get reversed automatically kind of sound creepy.
Speaker 3: Like for example, I remember Yoko oh No got accused
Speaker 3: of this. She had a song called Kiss, Kiss Kiss,
Speaker 3: and of course when you play kiss Kiss Kiss backwards,
Speaker 3: it's six six six for sure. And you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: I think certain words just sound easily like other words backwards.
Speaker 3: But I don't believe for a moment that this many
Speaker 3: words could sound good forwards and backwards, not for a second.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean also the weird exercise you'd have to
Speaker 1: go through to get to this point. I think the
Speaker 1: other important thing is like when you when you reverse lyrics,
Speaker 1: when you reverse words, you're gonna get other sounds. But
Speaker 1: those sounds are not going to have real context until
Speaker 1: you give them contexts and you you say like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that sound that that kind of six sixty sixth sound,
Speaker 1: it's going to sound like like six sixty six that
Speaker 1: sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a real Laurel or Yanny situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. I think the other telling thing about this so,
Speaker 1: first of all, it's an accusation that Robert Plant and
Speaker 1: their audio engineer at the time refuted, and unlike with
Speaker 1: the Beatles, it doesn't seem like the band or those
Speaker 1: involved in producing the tracks really found this technique all
Speaker 1: that interesting. And I don't know this is maybe just me,
Speaker 1: but I feel like if they had actually done this
Speaker 1: on purpose, it's one thing to cover it up during
Speaker 1: the initial period of satanic panic during the you know,
Speaker 1: certainly in the eighties and even nineties, but it seems
Speaker 1: like if this, if they had actually back masked some
Speaker 1: content here and gone to some links to put some
Speaker 1: satanic silliness in here, it would have come out right,
Speaker 1: Like how great are the surviving members of led Zeppelin
Speaker 1: going to really be at keeping secrets like this?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think when these things happened. Like another
Speaker 3: example of this that was famous at the time was
Speaker 3: the supposed sinking of playing Pink Floyd's Dark Side of
Speaker 3: the Moon with the Wizard of Oz and I gave
Speaker 3: you this whole experience with the two lined up perfectly,
Speaker 3: and everyone in Pink Floyd is like, how would we
Speaker 3: do that? You know, like we were just like in
Speaker 3: a studio. Everything's analog, Like we didn't have like you know, no,
Speaker 3: of course not, of course we couldn't have done that, you.
Speaker 1: Know, yeah, or like can you imagine the reality where
Speaker 1: they're like, yes, this is actually how we make all
Speaker 1: of our albums. We pick a classic movie, we play it,
Speaker 1: and we just match things up with what's happening on
Speaker 1: the screen. I mean that could be somebody's artistic technique,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's just those connections are not made by
Speaker 1: the creator. Those connections are made on your end. When
Speaker 1: you combine two things and look for meaning between those
Speaker 1: two things, which.
Speaker 3: Can be fun, but don't believe it. Yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 3: like fun is fun as long as you don't believe
Speaker 3: this nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, enjoy it, but don't ruin by going too far right.
Speaker 1: So I mentioned that there were potential real consequences for
Speaker 1: all this, Like it got to the point where there
Speaker 1: were actually some lawmakers that were interested in demanding backtracking
Speaker 1: warnings on albums so that consumers could be aware that
Speaker 1: there might be hidden messages, which is ridiculous to imagine,
Speaker 1: like may contain hidden messages that.
Speaker 3: May contain electric guitar.
Speaker 1: And this is another thing getting back to I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: how when you have the full tools of language at
Speaker 1: your disposal, there's so many things you can do to
Speaker 1: manipulate people, to hide your message, to say something kind
Speaker 1: of cheeky so that some people get it but others don't.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of stuff you can do with language that
Speaker 1: hasn't been reversed, and great lyricists are going to be
Speaker 1: able to use those tools, like doing this whole backtracking
Speaker 1: technique is just such a crude and ineffective way of
Speaker 1: hiding your secret message if you actually have a secret
Speaker 1: message you want to get out there.
Speaker 3: And especially too if you want to keep it a
Speaker 3: secret for most people. Like for example, Oh, let's say
Speaker 3: you're trying to send a secret message on a sheet
Speaker 3: of paper and you just write each of the letters backwards,
Speaker 3: so you have to hold it up and look at
Speaker 3: it in the mirror to read the message. Yeah, someone's
Speaker 3: going to figure it out like that. Let's say you
Speaker 3: take the first letter of each word in your lyrics
Speaker 3: and it spells a new secret message. Hey, that's going
Speaker 3: to be actually harder to decipher, you know, So it's
Speaker 3: not even a very good secret message.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, we mentioned Don McClain recently on the
Speaker 1: show when we discussed the Flight of Dragons, like American
Speaker 1: Pie has plenty of cryptic content within it, and that
Speaker 1: has achieved without reversing anything. Right. So anyway, getting back
Speaker 1: to this idea that like, why would you need a label, right,
Speaker 1: why would there need to be a warning saying mine
Speaker 1: contained secret messages? Because if it's backwards, I can't understand it. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: that's where we get into these claims, and I think
Speaker 1: these are this is this is pretty much been refuted
Speaker 1: as pseudoscience at this point. But this idea that backmasked
Speaker 1: messages can be understood subconsciously even if you're not consciously
Speaker 1: understanding them. So one of the main proponents of the
Speaker 1: power of reverse speech is an individual by the name
Speaker 1: of David John Oates. And this is a guy that's
Speaker 1: appeared on the likes of Coast to Coast. This is
Speaker 1: the you know, the radio station radio show rather that's
Speaker 1: popular and known for its various treatment of UFOs and
Speaker 1: so forth. You know, a lot of what I guess
Speaker 1: you've described a sort of fringe ideas. And Oates would
Speaker 1: discover this notion that normal speech contains a smaller percentage
Speaker 1: of backward speech that I'm not sure I even understand
Speaker 1: exactly what the idea here is. That maybe it kind
Speaker 1: of cuts to the chase a bit that the thing
Speaker 1: that you're sort of trying to say through with forward
Speaker 1: facing speech, you're also saying, at least in a simplistic form,
Speaker 1: through the reverse of the speech. There is an example
Speaker 1: that is sometimes used to support this, and it's apparently
Speaker 1: if you take Neil Armstrong in nineteen sixty nine saying
Speaker 1: small step for man of course during the lunar landing.
Speaker 1: If you were to reverse that it sounds something like
Speaker 1: manual spacewalk. And this one I thought sounded pretty pretty
Speaker 1: silly to me. I mean, what does that even mean? Why? What?
Speaker 1: What's my take home from that? If this is some
Speaker 1: sort of meaningful content, like I guess, it would at
Speaker 1: best mean that the smart things that you say forward
Speaker 1: sound stupid or backwards.
Speaker 3: It doesn't make any sense. If it at least like
Speaker 3: predicted the future, it'd be helpful, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 3: let's say he said small step for man, and then
Speaker 3: in reverse it actually said like, hey, watch out for
Speaker 3: that rock over there, you're going to trip over. It's
Speaker 3: like that would be helpful. He could use that information,
Speaker 3: you know. But but no, this is nothing. This is nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So again this has been widely refuted in scientific
Speaker 1: literature at pseudoscience, and one of the central arguments is that, okay,
Speaker 1: with oats work, and with well not even just oats work,
Speaker 1: but just in general, if you're trying to push this
Speaker 1: idea that the thing that you're about to hear reversed
Speaker 1: is going to say something else, it depends heavily on priming.
Speaker 1: You're being You're given an idea of what you were
Speaker 1: about to hear. Backwards, and I encountered that time and
Speaker 1: time again researching for this episode. Like when you go
Speaker 1: to the audio examples on the Wikipedia for Stairway to Heaven,
Speaker 1: he tells you what you're about to hear, what you
Speaker 1: were going to hear straightforward, and what you were expected
Speaker 1: to hear in reverse. So you're going into it to
Speaker 1: it looking for that template to line up. But what's
Speaker 1: really going on is something called paridolia. This is the
Speaker 1: tendency for humans to find meaning in something, be it
Speaker 1: seeing a face in the surface of the moon, secret
Speaker 1: messages in a reverse song, connections between this album and
Speaker 1: this movie when this movie's played on mute, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, and it's I mean, it's a powerful force.
Speaker 1: It's it's a it's something that guides a lot of
Speaker 1: our creativity that we can look at, like a smear
Speaker 1: on the wall. We can look at a cloud in
Speaker 1: the sky and we can we can we can lean
Speaker 1: into a version of it that's not there. We can
Speaker 1: make we can apply some sort of logic to it
Speaker 1: and create fantasy. And I think that, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: I feel like easily the far more sensible way of
Speaker 1: understanding any kind of sense that seems to come out
Speaker 1: of reverse speech. I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that
Speaker 1: meaningful reverse speech would simply emerge from traditional speech, as
Speaker 1: well as the idea that meaningful information could then be
Speaker 1: understood by our brain and even on like a subliminal level,
Speaker 1: like mad dog and goddamn sorry to have to curse again.
Speaker 1: But this is the one of the historical examples. These
Speaker 1: ideas are maybe not completely unconnected from each other, but
Speaker 1: they're also like there's not really a strong meaningful connection either,
Speaker 1: Like I'm not sure what the argument would be between
Speaker 1: those two words.
Speaker 3: And it's funny too because and then the argument is, oh,
Speaker 3: but only in English, you know, Yeah, because these words,
Speaker 3: let's say we say them in French instead, the two
Speaker 3: words will not be the same two words forward and backwards.
Speaker 3: You won't be the same message, no matter what. That's
Speaker 3: basically impossible. So so no, you know, it's like when
Speaker 3: people make arguments about oh, great predictions followed through like
Speaker 3: the myan calendar or something. It's like, yeah, but they
Speaker 3: didn't use like leap days like we do, you know,
Speaker 3: like what time zone were they using? Like like these
Speaker 3: things don't line up, like like different cultures have different
Speaker 3: ways to kind of like parcel out our lives, and
Speaker 3: they don't match up cross culturally, so you can't just
Speaker 3: say something is a universal truth. It's just like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe that only works in English for me when I
Speaker 3: have the words written down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was looking at a couple of sources
Speaker 1: on this, you get a little more depth in it.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty five, JR. Voki and JD. Reid suggested
Speaker 1: that some information might pass through when you were when
Speaker 1: you were reversing using reversed audio, But they were also
Speaker 1: very firm on the matter being misrepresented in the media
Speaker 1: in this in nineteen eighty five and one of their papers,
Speaker 1: they write, quote, is there any evidence to warrant ascertations
Speaker 1: that such a messages affect our behavior across a wide
Speaker 1: variety of tasks. We were unable to find any evidence
Speaker 1: to support such a claim. Secondarily, we present evidence to
Speaker 1: suggest that the apparent presence of backward messages in popular
Speaker 1: music is a function more of active construction on the
Speaker 1: part of the perceiver than of the existence of the
Speaker 1: messages themselves.
Speaker 3: Right, almost like a roar shack test.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, And this I think is extremely telling too.
Speaker 1: At two thousand and one study by Kriner, Altis and
Speaker 1: Vass found that quote no priming effect was found for
Speaker 1: backwards messages, although there were significant priming for forward messages.
Speaker 1: The results are not consistent with an effect of reverse
Speaker 1: speech on word processing. And I think that's this is
Speaker 1: really key, because we know that priming works with forward
Speaker 1: with normal language, that I can say something to you
Speaker 1: and I can prime you for something, and the effects
Speaker 1: of that priming is measurable through experimentation. So if something
Speaker 1: wise to come through via reversed audio through back masking,
Speaker 1: it would have an effect on priming, and we would
Speaker 1: be able to measure that. And there's nothing to measure
Speaker 1: because it doesn't work. It doesn't do that. Now that
Speaker 1: being said, there's still plenty of fun examples of back
Speaker 1: masking in music. One that came up for me and
Speaker 1: this is another example of the song that I've heard
Speaker 1: many times, but I did not really think about the
Speaker 1: back masking in it because I'm just so used to
Speaker 1: hearing this technique. It's cool, but I don't give it
Speaker 1: a lot of second thought or even wonder what's being reversed.
Speaker 1: But there's a great Boards of Canada album Geogotti and
Speaker 1: there's a track titled you Could Feel the Sky, and
Speaker 1: there's definitely some back mask audio in there, and it
Speaker 1: may be reversed. It seems like it's likely a reversal
Speaker 1: of a clip from I think a documentary on paganism
Speaker 1: that says the God with Horns, and I guess this
Speaker 1: is maybe just kind of a cheeky nod to back
Speaker 1: masking history in some of the Satanic panic ideas, which
Speaker 1: of course Boards of Canada would have very much been
Speaker 1: familiar with. And there's still so many examples too of
Speaker 1: people going into business for themselves on back masking, playing
Speaker 1: stuff backwards, sharing it on YouTube and saying, hey, clearly,
Speaker 1: if you play this Black Sabbath lyric backwards, you hear
Speaker 1: I want to be like Jesus. Stuff like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's if you're just going into it purely for fun. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's probably some fun and amusing quote unquote discoveries to make.
Speaker 3: There, but just keep in mind that it's just as
Speaker 3: much meaning as can be applied to spilling some alphabet
Speaker 3: soup on the floor and seeing how many words are spelled.
Speaker 1: Outs, you know exactly.
Speaker 3: That can be fun, but there's no meaning there.
Speaker 1: I thought It was put really well in a piece
Speaker 1: of salon written by Eric Davis. This piece was titled
Speaker 1: what exactly lyrics within the background grooves of Stairway to
Speaker 1: Heaven quote. Soon, backmasking became the Satanic Panic du jour,
Speaker 1: giving paranoid Christians technological proof that rock bands like Queen
Speaker 1: Kiss and Sticks and then there's an exclamation point in
Speaker 1: Parnhesies did indeed play the Devil's music. While most people
Speaker 1: Christian or otherwise found all this rather silly, these fears
Speaker 1: did reflect more pervasive fears that the media had become
Speaker 1: a subliminal master of puppets, fears that would themselves come
Speaker 1: to inspire some nineteen eighties metal and I think this
Speaker 1: one might have also been the paper to point out
Speaker 1: that you also get these ridiculous images and ridiculous footage
Speaker 1: of some of the provocateurs of Satanic Panic, some of
Speaker 1: the individuals that were making these accusations, messing around with
Speaker 1: record players and playing stuff backwards and just really gazing
Speaker 1: hard and deep and trying to find evidence of Satan
Speaker 1: in the reversed audio.
Speaker 3: Hey, you know, everyone needs a hobby. I'm glad they're
Speaker 3: having fun. Good for them.
Speaker 1: How about you Seth. Do you have any favorite examples
Speaker 1: of backmasking You A.
Speaker 3: Uh, yeah, yeah, I have one that I absolutely love,
Speaker 3: not only because I think it's a fun example of,
Speaker 3: you know, kind of how this can influence a song's
Speaker 3: writing and kind of create a finished product, but also
Speaker 3: just because I think it's a lovely song off of
Speaker 3: a wonderful album by one of my favorite bands. Here's
Speaker 3: an example. This is off of radioheads two thousand and
Speaker 3: one album Amnesiac. There's a very alien sounding song called
Speaker 3: like Spinning Plates. It sounds so odd because it originally
Speaker 3: started off as a song called I Will, which is
Speaker 3: very funny because Radiohead eventually actually finished that song and
Speaker 3: released it on a later album. But enough about that.
Speaker 3: They were trying to record this song during this recording
Speaker 3: session called I Will, and they just couldn't get it
Speaker 3: to work. They were just messing around with it, doing whatever,
Speaker 3: and at one point they decided to play it backwards
Speaker 3: and they're like, yeah, that's it, that's the album I
Speaker 3: want to hear. So they had this instrumental for this
Speaker 3: song backwards and I this is good. This is good,
Speaker 3: And so Tom York, the lead singer, he created a
Speaker 3: new vocal melody to go over it. But when you
Speaker 3: played the forward vocal melody over the backwards song, it
Speaker 3: just didn't quite line up. It just didn't sound right.
Speaker 3: They didn't mesh together. So what he decided to do
Speaker 3: instead was to phonetically take the words he wanted to say,
Speaker 3: reverse them, and then sing it backwards. He was obviously
Speaker 3: singing forward in real time, but he's singing the backwards
Speaker 3: result of what he wanted, so when he reversed it,
Speaker 3: it would sound like forward words. Oh wow, So I'll
Speaker 3: say that in a morsisstinct way. Tom York made up
Speaker 3: new words that were phonetically the backwards version of his
Speaker 3: new forward vocals, and then reverse the recording, creating lyrics
Speaker 3: that sounded forward in the final song but are actually
Speaker 3: being reversed. A very similar system was used in the
Speaker 3: TV show Twin Peaks for the character the Man from
Speaker 3: Another Place aka the Arm. He's the guy that's like,
Speaker 3: you know, sometimes my arm's been back. You know that
Speaker 3: you like will come back in style that guy. That's
Speaker 3: very similar system. Yeah, but as we'll point out, it's
Speaker 3: just like all this discussion we've been having that character
Speaker 3: of the man from Another Place from Twin Peaks, he
Speaker 3: always had subtitles, because would you really be able to
Speaker 3: understand what he was saying backwards if there weren't subtitles there.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: That's a great point. That's a key point. Now. I
Speaker 1: love Radiohead, and I love Tom Yorke's vocals. Tom new
Speaker 1: York's vocals almost seemed like the perfect vocals to use
Speaker 1: in an experiment of reverse because I don't know. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I feel like there's certain vocalists whose voices I think
Speaker 1: of more as a musical instrument, like a pure instrument,
Speaker 1: as opposed to a deliverer of actual linguistic information. And
Speaker 1: I don't mean that as like a slam on them,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't necessarily mean that I can't understand what
Speaker 1: they're saying. I mean sometimes I think of people like
Speaker 1: like Maynard from Tool. You know, It's like I can
Speaker 1: understand the words he's saying, but I'm not really engaging
Speaker 1: with what he's saying on a lyrical level. It's more
Speaker 1: about like the pure sound experience, and I feel like
Speaker 1: that's that's what I have with Tom York.
Speaker 3: Well, if you look at like the kind of the
Speaker 3: hallmarks of reversed audio, and what's really changing. The big key,
Speaker 3: the thing that we cannot create with forward sounds and
Speaker 3: can only be created backwards is when anything percussive occurs,
Speaker 3: it goes and there's like a big sound at the
Speaker 3: beginning and then it trails off very quickly. So when
Speaker 3: you hear that backwards, especially thinking about something like the
Speaker 3: sound of like a drum being played backwards, it's a
Speaker 3: which is a very iconic backwards sound. I suppose, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm the one who edits these episodes. I could just
Speaker 3: put in a reverse sound there, but no, no, no,
Speaker 3: I like making with my mouth instead. But but yeah,
Speaker 3: I think that's a big part of it. And Tom
Speaker 3: York has a very vowel heavy, very floaty, ethereal singing style,
Speaker 3: lots of oohs and ahs and moaning and kind of
Speaker 3: like soft sounds. So because of that, forwards and backwards
Speaker 3: doesn't affect it too much. You know, he's not a percussive,
Speaker 3: you know, singer, and the percussion is really what signifies, oh,
Speaker 3: something's backwards here.
Speaker 1: So huh, all right, everybody, that's going to have to
Speaker 1: be side A and you're gonna have to flip it
Speaker 1: over for side B. We ended up reaching the point
Speaker 1: where we're going to have to cut this one in half,
Speaker 1: but we'll be back in the next episode of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. Seth Will and I will continue
Speaker 1: this discussion and we'll get more into physical media where
Speaker 1: we'll start talking about well, essentially enter the labyrinth of
Speaker 1: Vinyl records. In the meantime, I'll just remind everybody that
Speaker 1: core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind published on
Speaker 1: Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind
Speaker 1: podcast feed Mondays, we do listener mail. Wednesdays we do
Speaker 1: a short form artifactor Monster Effect, and on Fridays we
Speaker 1: do Weird House Cinema our time to set aside most
Speaker 1: series concerns and just talk about a weird film. By
Speaker 1: the time you're listening to this, I think Joe is
Speaker 1: actually back, So uh, we should be welcoming Joe back
Speaker 1: on some episodes in the very near future. But we
Speaker 1: recorded these episodes ahead of time. And as always, thanks
Speaker 1: to Seth Nichols Johnson for not only co hosting but
Speaker 1: of course producing Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And if
Speaker 1: you want to reach out to any of us, if
Speaker 1: you have feedback on this episode, you have thoughts about
Speaker 1: reversed music and so forth. Well, you can email us
Speaker 1: at contact. It's Stuff to Blow Your Mind dot com.
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Sat there at the time.
Speaker 3: The farm part