Backmasking: backwards messages in music

How backmasking works

On tape it was simple: turn the reel over and the sound plays in reverse. Producers recorded a vocal, a guitar or a spoken line, flipped it and laid it into the song. Today any audio editor does it in one click. The result sounds like speech but is not, because the sounds of a word come out in the wrong order and turned inside out.

That is the opposite of talking backwards. In backmasking nobody speaks backwards; the machine reverses normal speech. When you talk backwards, you produce the reversed sounds yourself so that a reversed recording sounds normal.

Famous examples

• The Beatles, "Rain" (1966). The first backwards vocal on a major single. Lennon wanted the whole song reversed; George Martin and Paul McCartney kept it to the coda.
• Frank Zappa, We're Only in It for the Money (1968). A verse his label censored went back on the record reversed.
• Electric Light Orchestra (1975 and 1983). Accused of hiding messages, ELO added real ones to Face the Music and called a later album Secret Messages.
• Styx, Kilroy Was Here (1983). A mock warning sticker and a backwards Latin motto in "Heavy Metal Poisoning", aimed at their critics.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic (1984). Parodied the panic with his own deliberately silly backwards message.
• Roger Waters, Amused to Death (1992). Hid a backwards message addressed to Stanley Kubrick.
• Clean versions of rap and pop songs. Swear words are often reversed rather than bleeped, which is how "ish" became a stand-in for a ruder word.

The satanic panic

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some evangelical preachers claimed that rock bands hid satanic commands in their records and that the brain obeyed them without noticing. In 1981 a Christian DJ claimed "Stairway to Heaven" carried hidden messages. Led Zeppelin's label replied that their turntables only play in one direction: forwards.

The panic reached lawmakers. In 1982 a US congressman proposed warning labels. In 1983 Arkansas passed a labelling bill that was vetoed, and a California committee played "Stairway to Heaven" backwards at a hearing. Churches held record burnings, and radio DJs who encouraged listeners to hunt for messages were fired.

It ended up in court. In 1990 two families sued Judas Priest, claiming hidden messages led to a suicide pact. The judge dismissed the case, finding the research did not show such messages could cause anything of the kind.

Does backmasking do anything to you?

No. In 1985 psychologists John Vokey and Don Read at the University of Lethbridge played people backwards messages and found no effect on their behaviour. Later studies found the same. What does happen is suggestion: tell someone what a reversed clip "says" and they hear it. Scientists call this pareidolia, the same instinct that finds faces in clouds.

Questions