Pushkin a warning this episode will contain a mention of suicide.

If you're suffering with suicidal thoughts, support is available, for example, from nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US or the Samaritans in the UK.

In the nineteen eighties, satanic panic ripped through America as listeners to cautionary tales well know from our episode demonizing dungeons and dragons, but tabletop role playing games weren't the only thing spreading alarm.

So too was rock music.

Were musicians slipping in secret messages convincing young children to take drugs and worship the devil, Messages that could be decoded only if you played the music backwards.

Twenty thousand Hertz is a brilliant podcast all about sound, and they've explored the bizarre history and science around this rock music hysteria.

So I'm gonna hand over to them for this episode.

Sir, it'sillary.

I want to take you back to nineteen eighty five.

Tragedy occurs in Reno, Nevada.

Two young men attempt to take their lives together.

One of them dies instantly and three years later the other dies from complications related to the attempt, but their parents aren't convinced.

The young men acted on their own.

The night of the tragedy, they listened to this song.

This is the Judas Priest cover of the Spooky Tooth song better by You, Better than Me.

In nineteen ninety the young men's family sued Judas Priest over this song You.

The prosecution against Judas Priest made a big claim.

They said secret messages in the song encouraged them to take their lives, and the only way to hear these messages was to play the record backwards.

Listen carefully.

Did you hear the words I shot my demons dead when I'm with you?

Here it is again.

Adding secret backwards messages and music wasn't anything new.

Even before the so called Satanic panic of the eighties and nineties.

People had been playing recorded sounds backwards since the invention of the phonograph.

The ability to capture and preserve sound also gave people the ability to manipulate it.

That's Brian Gardner.

Brian wrote about the history of back masking for Atlas Obscura.

When people talk about back masking in the audio world, it's generally considered a deliberate recording process where a sound whether it's an instrument or a voice, is recorded and played backward and then placed somewhere into the forward mix of a song.

Sometimes that can be obvious.

You're carrying a song and then you hear some sort of weird garbled reverse version.

You can kind of make it out.

Sometimes it's more hidden in a track, but that's the basic idea of back masking.

The earliest example of back masking in popular music comes in the early sixties from a group called the Eligibles, but their most famous recording has no backmasking in it.

Just right, I'm a trick, that's right.

The Eligibles, who perform the Gilligan's Island theme song, also had the first backmasking hit in the late fifties.

They recorded this song called Car Trouble.

Car Trouble on Lonely Wrong.

It's about a boy who's taking out a girl on a date in his car.

During the song, there are two instances of what sound like really garbled yelling.

The first instance is the girl friend's father be back.

Home, mad I ask, or health girl.

Supposedly, the message is now look a here, kats, stop running these records backwards.

Let's hear that moment with the dad yelling again, but this time backwards.

Now look at her.

That stop running his records back war.

After the girlfriend's dad yells, the boy and the girl go on their date.

When they try to come back, the boy's car won't start, They have to walk home, show up late, and dad yells again.

The song says, didn't I tell you to get my daughter back by ten thirty?

You bum to get.

My daughter back by ten thirty Yo bye.

A few years after Car Trouble, it was the Beatles who really brought back masking to the forefront of music culture.

The Beatles were recording nineteen sixty six as a revolver.

The idea for back masking made its way into the song Rain.

If you listen to it all the way through, there's sort of this ending coda, and here's that coda, and it's just basically a reverse of the first line of the song.

And here's that coda played in reverse.

Bands were actually legitimately doing this, They were inserting messages.

Often they were just reversed lyrics in their own songs, but in general fans of rock and roll music were aware of this, at least the sort of geeky audio file ones.

So far this all sounds pretty tame, but it was this next song that was the spark that ignited the initial flames of panic.

Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine Number.

In nineteen sixty nine, there was a radio DJ named Russ Gibb and he gets a phone call from a student at the Eastern Michigan University and the student claims that there's this rumor about Paul McCartney.

He's been dead actually, and replaced by some strange doppelganger Paul McCartney who looks and sounds just like him, but is not the real Paul McCartney.

Oh no, The caller tells GiB to basically play the Beatles song Revolution number nine backward.

GiB then here's the phrase, turn me on, dead Man, Turn me on dead Man, turn.

Me on, me on, trn me on.

So GiB freaks out and begins telling all of his listeners about what he calls sort of this great Beatles cover up, and more and more people start listening for clues, and lo and behold, they found them, including there was another alleged back mask message Paul is a dead man.

Miss him, miss him, miss him?

And that was in the song I'm So Tired.

The Dead Pole messages found by Beatles fans sound stranger and subtler than the ones in Rain or Car Trouble.

Many people, including the Beatles, said that's because there wasn't actual backmasking.

They didn't mean to do it.

Keep in mind, this was at a time when people were already worried about subliminal messages.

There was this renewed interest in subliminal manipulation, and this is largely the result of books.

They claimed, basically that the general public was being manipulated by ad agencies.

The idea was that hidden messages could get into your subconscious.

Once planted there, they could influence the way you think.

Supposedly, certain images would be inserted, you know, on the front box of cigarettes, or you could make out naked women in the bubbles in a gin ad in a magazine.

These subliminal manipulations were not limited to visuals.

Many believed these backwards messages and songs could also control the way people think and act.

To be more blunt, many people believed that backmasking could make you worship the devil.

There had always been this idea that rock and roll was the devil's music.

And once certain conservative pastors found out about this, this gave them sort of an opportunity to listen to these things, and I guess in some cases they literally could hear the voice.

What these pastors found shocked them.

Here's a clip from the Praise the Lord Show.

In it, pastor Paul Crouch and his wife Jan listen as their son Paul Junior plays led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven backwards.

All right, I'll slow this down a little bit.

Listen for Here's to My Sweet Satan.

Did y'all hear that?

And it wasn't just led Zeppelin.

Satanic messages were supposedly hidden all over rock albums.

Here's a backwards version of Electric Light Orchestra's El Dorado.

Listen for this message.

He is the nasty one Christ, You're infernal.

It is said we're dead men.

Yes, Exco wants by Sto Funes sah.

We.

And here's the backwards version of Hotel California by the Eagles.

The message this time is Satan had Hm he organized his own religion.

Yes.

Beyond that, here's the band Sticks proclaiming Satan moves through our voices in the backwards version of the song Snowblind.

Apparently, there are examples of this all over seventies and eighties rock music.

The Praise the Lord Show wasn't the only one finding these hits subversive messages.

There was a famous pastor, Gary Greenwald, who actually started a sort of back masking tour where he would travel around the United States and even went up to Canada and would hold basically what our record listening parties where he would play these things for the audience, pointing out every time what the back mask message supposedly was, and people would freak out.

Often they would be followed by album burning parties or whatever.

He also had a television show briefly where he would do these sort of things as well.

Is it possible that this could be preparing us subconsciously through backward masking to accept a child that is coming that is none other than the son of Satan.

Let me play that for you backwards and you tell me who.

The child is.

Listen carefully.

By this point many had gone into full blown satanic panic, so obviously the next step was for the government to put a stop to it.

Starting in the early eighties, you saw an uptick in actual legislation aimed at combating backmasking.

A member of the California State Assembly created a panel to investigate satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven and other songs.

He gathered all these witnesses, He gathered a person who purportedly was a neuroscientist who sort of explained how these backward messages were influencing or could influence kids who didn't necessarily even play the albums backwards.

And then it kind of just snowballed.

The call for local legislation turned into a cry for national laws.

Now it was time for the US Congress to get involved.

People were actively introducing legislation and trying to pass bills that, if not outlawed the practice, mandated warning signs on all the albums that supposedly had these nefarious messages on them.

Rock bands and producers continued to claim that backwards messages were completely and totally unintentional.

Styx's James Young called the whole idea of satanic back masking a hoax perpetrated by religious zealots.

Led Zeppelin's record label issued one statement based on the backmasking controversy, which was our turntables only rotate in one direction.

So when tragedy struck in Reno, Nevada in nineteen eighty five, the music industry was already under a microscope for back masking, and even though none of these laws actually passed, the Judas Priest trial in nineteen ninety had everyone in the music industry watching.

If the band lost, it would set a precedent that anyone could be sued for backwards combinations of sounds creating an unintentional message.

We'll get that plus the brain science behind backmasking.

After this, in the late eighties, the Satanic panic was in full swing.

Parents, government officials, churches, and even some scientists believe that backwards messages in rock songs influenced young people in terrible ways.

Then, in nineteen ninety, Judas Priest were being sued over hidden commands in their songs, which allegedly influenced two people to take their lives.

If they lost this case, it would mean that any band could be held liable for the actions resulting from their supposedly hidden messages.

In a one hundred and eight page written decision, if Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead found that Judas Priest and CBS records are not liable in causing the deaths.

The judge also ruled that there is no proof of backwards masking on the album and in any case, no scientific proof that backwards masking can be per received or affect conduct.

In the end, Judas Priest and the music industry were cleared of all charges, and no matter if it's intentional or accidental, they proved backmasking can't control your thoughts.

Still, backmasking had become a really, really big deal.

Some musicians today still use it to play intentional messages in their songs, albeit usually to poke fun at the whole controversy.

Here's an example from weird Al Yankovic's I Remember Larry See if you can understand what he's saying.

So, what weird Al was saying was, Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.

Here it is one more time.

Despite the music industry's efforts, many people still hear unintentional backmasking message is Here's an ironically titled song from Cheap Trick called Gonna Raise Hell.

See if you can make out the message, you can hear a huge difference between the two.

Weird AU's message is clear and cheap Trick's message is much harder to understand.

Supposedly, they're saying, you know, Satan holds the keys to the lock.

Here it is again, I think is pretty evident in the difference you hear between songs that have intentional backmasking and songs that don't.

Necessarily that's Ashley Hamer, the managing editor for Curiosity dot Com and co host of the Curiosity Daily podcast.

Ashley wrote about backmasking for the website.

I'm actually also a freelance musician.

I have an undergrad an of Masters in jazz performance.

So she's uniquely qualified for this particular topic.

When it's intentional, you hear a very clear voice saying something.

But when you hear these unintentional ones, it sounds like a ghost, like someone who can't quite talk.

They're trying to speak through a veil or something.

And the same is true when you turn them backward.

Here's that backwards message in weird Al's I Remember Larry Again, but this time played forward.

It sounds a lot like those unintentional backwards messages.

It sounds satanic, it sounds ghostly.

I don't think there is a human on earth who can actually talk like that.

Bob Garcia of Anam Records once said, it must be the devil putting these messages on the records, because no one here knows how to do it.

When you see the kinds of back masking that has become famous, the inadvertent back masking, it's pretty simple and it doesn't really make a lot of sense, Like they're not really things that people would normally say, like Stairway to Heaven by led Zeppelin, Here's to My Sweet Satanish.

It only has one two syllable word in it.

Everything else is just a single syllable.

And that's how a lot of these supposed backmasking messages are.

They're very simple.

They're just syllable by syllable, and a single syllable can sound like a lot of different things.

Even if the words are simple, these unintentional noises sound to us like language.

This concept is called paridolia.

It basically means that us humans really like to find patterns sometimes in places where there are no patterns.

It's the same reason why you might see a face on Mars or a bunny rabbit in a cloud.

Our minds are constantly on the lookout to make sense of the world around us.

Sometimes we turn things that don't actually make sense into things that do.

The big thing with back masking is the idea that we really love language.

It's really important for us to be able to communicate.

It is basically what keeps us alive.

If we can't tell each other our needs, if we can't get mates, if we can't tell each other that, oh, I found this food over here, let's go get it, we're not really going to survive.

Our brain is hardwired to find messages.

We're so good at picking out language that sometimes we do it by accident.

That's because our brains process information in two different ways, bottom up and top down.

Bottom up processing is basically when you build things from the ground up.

You have a texture or a color or a shape, and you figure out what it is from all of the details.

But top down processing uses kind of that higher order thinking where you're thinking about context and what you've experienced before and what you kind of know about the situation to form a judgment.

That's how we interpret language.

Our brains, particularly hear language if another person primes us by telling us what to listen for.

Here's an example from Queen's Another one bites the dust played backwards.

I'm not yet gonna tell you what it is.

If you didn't know what to listen for, you probably heard gibberish.

Here it is again.

Now listen for the message, it's fun to smoke marijuana.

It's fun to smoke marijuana.

It's fun to smoke.

When someone tells you that a bunch of noise actually is saying it's fun to smoke marijuana, you're gonna hear it because your brain is using that higher order information that has already told you that this is language to hear the thing that you're told to hear.

And an early eighties study in the Journal of Science backed up Ashley's point.

They divided the participants into three groups, and the first group was just asked to describe.

What they heard.

They weren't told anything else.

They heard something like this, and.

Most of those people said they heard things like science fiction sounds or animal cries.

Researchers played people sin waves speech.

It's real speech, but it's artificially degraded so that any evidence of a message is completely lost, and there are only certain frequencies left over.

So if you were to listen to this without any context, it would just sound like noise, which is kind of what backmasking sounds like.

The second group was told that they would hear an actual sentence that was produced by a computer, and they were asked to write down what that sentence said.

Okay, now that you know this is human speech, let's hear it again.

See if you can pick out any words and again.

And actually most to those people figured out at least a few of the words correctly, because again, this sine wave speech.

It had been real speech before, and it was just degraded.

As soon as those people knew that it was a sentence, they were able to describe what some of these words were.

And then the third group was actually told what the sentence said, and all of them said that they could hear it.

The distorted message you heard earlier said, Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo.

Now take a listen, here's the clean version.

Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo.

So it's easier for your brain to hear a message if someone else primes it like I just did.

So if priming is a thing, maybe backwards messages have the ability to influence our thinking well.

As it turns out, accidental and intentional.

Backwards messages have no control over our brains.

People have done studies on this.

They've actually taken backward audio that is real and played it for people, and then they've given them a test that should elicit some sort of recognition if a seed was planted for a particular word or something that was played backward, and it just doesn't work.

People who hear backward messages have no idea what those things are saying.

It doesn't communicate any subliminal message to anybody.

Backwards messages and songs can't hypnotize us into bad behavior, but they can make us laugh, like this backmast thought on the B fifty two's Detour through Your Mind.

My Very my sh it's the back.

Play record backworth, watch out you fight ruin yours needle.

Backmasking can also be used artistically, like in Missy Elliott's work it is it Worth, Let me work it REVERSI and here's that same section reversed reverse is your mind?

Yes, the reverse?

Many backwards messages or comments on the Satanic panic of the seventies and eighties.

Electric Light Orchestra played to their evil reputation by adding backmasking to their song Fire on High.

This was in response to accusations of hiding satanic messages in previous releases.

Here's that song in reverse.

The music is reversible, but time.

Turn back, turn back.

Turn back.

You might think the Judas Priest verdict was the reason backmasking outrage ended, but actually it was technology.

The whole satanism scare in backward music kind of died down when CDs became more popular because you can't really play CDs backwards, so people weren't as worried about it anymore.

For a couple decades, we didn't hear many backmask messages at all, intentional or otherwise.

But now it's starting to come back thanks to the Internet.

It's kind of ramping back up now that there's so much digital music software where you can actually play things backward again.

More recently, here's a track by twenty one pilots called Nico and the Niners, and they put back masking in the intro.

Here's a snippet of what it sounds like when played forward.

So sure, and here it is reversed.

The poetic message says, we are bandidos.

You will leave Dima and head true East.

True We denounce violism, and of course with the intentional backmasking comes the unintentional.

This time it's Lady Gaga praising the devil in the backwards version of Paparazzi.

The Internet has revealed this message evil save us these stars above above.

We model it on the arts of Lucifer.

It wouldn't be this big of a deal if music wasn't so integral to our culture and the way we interact with each other and the way we process our feelings and our thoughts about the world.

The idea that someone is putting in secret messages to hijack the way that we interact with our music is so scary because it's so important to us.

The fact, say, the Satanic panic over backmasking was much ado about nothing.

The devil worshiping messages were unintentional and ineffective.

I mean, how many people do you know that listen to led Zeppelin or Judas priests that now actively worship the devil all the time.

It was really only the rise of CDs that stopped the backmasking outrage.

But with that in mind, now that I think about it, has anyone ever really thoroughly gone through all of the songs over the past twenty years of digital music.

At least a check for backwards messages.

We have a lot to soar through.

Maybe all of the backwards messages we haven't found yet have been controlling our every thought and feelings.

You'd be rare if I did this.

Sep twenty thousand.

Turts is hosted by me Dallas Taylor been produced out of the studios of De Facto Sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film and games sound incredible.

Find out more at de factosound dot com.

This episode was written and produced by James in Chercasso and me Dallas Taylor.

With help from Sam Sneably.

It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Beijan and Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to Brian Gardner and Ashley Hamer.

Ashley is the managing editor of Curiosity dot com and the co host of the award winning Curiosity Daily podcast, which comes out every weekday.

She also plays saxophone with the band fuzz That's f u Zzz.

If you'd like to find him on Apple or Spotify.

You're actually listening to their song Hangtime right now.

Finally, I want you to go out and find backmasked messages and popular songs and send it to me.

Find a track, play it backwards and tweet what you hear at twenty k org on Twitter.

If it's funny and relatively clean, I'll retweet it.

Let's start a panic and so Lyf sing it.

Am.

There are plenty more episodes full of human stories and lovingly crafted soundscapes, everything from the science of cat and dog communication to the history of corporate musicals and how Beethoven kept composing even after losing his hearing.

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