No one practice in music has been the focus or cause of so many conspiracy theories as backmasking. Backmasking is a recording technique in which sounds or lyrics are recorded backwards onto a track which is meant to be played forward. This practice went from being an artistic curiosity to sparking a nationwide moral panic in the US in the latter half of the 1970s and 1980s.   

It had been possible to listen to recordings backward from the very advent of the phonograph, by simply rotating the cylinder or the disc in the opposite direction. In 1878, Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, said that played backwards, “the song is still melodious in many cases, . . . but altogether different from the song reproduced in the right way”. Intentional backmasking only became possible from the 1950s with the proliferation of tape recorders in recording studios and the development of the avant-garde musique concréte style. The 1966 Beatles album, Revolver, brought this practice to the attention of the public and was first used by them for the guitar solo in Tomorrow Never Knows. The Beatles’ track Rain was the first song to have a backmasked message. By 1969, backmasked messages in Beatles songs became the cornerstone of ‘proof’ to the ‘Paul is dead’ theory. The rumour that Paul McCartney had been killed in a car accident and replaced with a lookalike, had circulated on college campuses in America, but on 12th October 1969 when WKNR-FM in Detroit received a caller who called himself ‘Tom’. Tom got the DJ to play Revolution 9 backwards and claimed that the message “turn me on dead man” could be heard. Following this incident and a misunderstood satirical album review of Abbey Road, the rumour was picked up by national papers. The rumour became so widespread that when McCartney was interviewed in Life magazine, it ran with the cover headline: “Paul is still with us”. Other ‘clues’ were unearthed included backmasked messages in I’m So Tired and Strawberry Fields Forever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqUAZE0nG18

While backmasking had long been imbibed with conspiracy, during the late 70s and 80s, for some, the practise became a method of subliminal stimulation. The rise of the Christian right in America, led to fundamentalist pastors claiming that backmasked messages could bypass the conscious mind and be accepted by the listener unconsciously. Christian DJ Michael Mills claimed on his radio show that Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven contained subliminal messages. On a different Christian radio station, William Yarroll, a neuroscientist (his words), claimed that rock stars were in league with the Church of Satan and were using backmasking to convert the young to their nefarious ways. Public claims like this opened the floodgates and soon bands from Pink Floyd to Electric Light Orchestra were accused of working for the man downstairs in order to corrupt and brainwash children’s minds. Fundamentalist pastors toured America to warn parents of the clear and present danger to their children and led mass record-smashings and burnings. Even those wettest of wet blankets, the Parents’ Music Resource Centre (PMRC), got in on the act, investigating the threat of Satanic messages in rock songs. All this led to legislation being brought before the state assemblies in California and Arkansas in order to protect  against this threat. The 1983 Californian bill was introduced to prevent backmasking which could “manipulate our behavior without our knowledge or consent and turn us into disciples of the Antichrist”.

Arguably, the controversy around backmasking reached its zenith with the court case of James Vance Vs. Judas Priest in 1990. In 1985, James Vance and Raymond Belkamp, 20 and 18, following a long night of drinking, drugs and listening to Judas Priest, decided to shoot themselves with a shotgun. Belkamp died, but Vance survived for three years before succumbing to his injuries. In this time he initiated a lawsuit against Judas Priest claiming, in reference to the album: “all of a sudden we got a suicide message, and we got tired of life”. The plaintiffs sought $6.2 million for “product liability”. Freedom of speech in rock music had already being tested by a similar case the year previous involving Ozzy Osbourne and his track Suicide Solution. But, the judge ruled that subliminal messages did not constitute actual speech and therefore Judas Priest were not protected, as Osborne had been, by the First Amendment. Despite the band’s common sense defence – why would they want paying fans to kill themselves – the trial proceeded for about a month. While the case was dismissed, the final ruling did actually state that while there were subliminal messages on the album, they could not be blamed for the young men’s actions. This was a high water mark for visibility for backmasking in the mainstream media, although because the ruling was neither the hard yes or no that people like to hear, it was largely ignored. But soon after this point, the adoption of CDs as the primary conduit of music, which could not be played backwards, largely put the kibosh on the moral panic because people simply could not check unless they had a recording studio at their disposal.

While heavy metal bands used Satanic imagery and did backmask Satanic messages into their songs, this was done for commercial reasons and increasingly as a reaction against the establishment as they progressively came under fire from groups such as the PMRC for being a corrupting influence. Attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon, not of backmasking itself, but of people finding satanic messages in songs where they (let’s face it) probably do not exist. Sceptics such as Michael Shermer argue that people hearing things in songs is caused by false perception of a pattern. Basically, he would argue that it is a evolutionary hangover from a time when it was crucially important to identify patterns, such as a predator moving, in an environment filled with noise. Others would say that it is apophenia, namely the human tendency to search for patterns in things that are essentially meaningless and random. Some point the finger, somewhat unsurprisingly, at the very people who purport to warn people of the dangers of subliminal messaging (and getting paid in the process) due to the observer-expectancy effect, meaning that people will only hear the message after having it pointed out to them. New technology and the availability of sound-editing software for computers have led to a renewal accusations against musicians thought to be in league with the devil, though now it’s mostly against Justin Bieber.