[Rock&Roll Ninja]

Well, not just backmasking, but I want all the little tricks & riddles musicians use to be covered in this thread. Of course there is the famous Beatles "Paul is Dead" episode: holding a mirror upto the Sgt.Pepper's album revealed the sinister rumor. And then Judas Priest's 'Better By You, Better Than Me', when played backwards, instructed (allegedly) listeners to "Just Do It". What they are supposed to do is never spoken; mow the lawn? drink a beer upsidedown? Two teenagers came to the logical conclusion of 'double suicide', and almost destroyed the heavy metal community in the process.

At a time when the music industry desperately needs young folk to sit & listen (and buy the album), you don't hear about any of these puzzles being made anymore. What studio could resist the thought of thousands of teenagers not downloading, but buying a physical album and listening to it again and again, trying to decipher the message in the music, or in the album art.

Are there any artists doing these kind of thiongs nowadays? I'm thinking I might be able to write a few albums. that when combined Voltron-style, will make the riddliest riddle ever written! I wonder how many kinds of cryptography the 'net generation will not be able to hack in the first 6 months??

 

[F1GTR]

"Hey Paul...Let's get rid of Clarence and steal all his good ideas."

 

[pcolbeck]

Quote:

Two teenagers came to the logical conclusion of 'double suicide', and almost destroyed the heavy metal community in the process.

Not really, perhaps in the Bible Belt of the USA but in most other places in the world people just thought that that was a ridiculas excuse wether they were into metal or not. For that mater in the UK (where they are from) Judas Priest aren't taken seriously at all but rather though of as rather camp and silly (good fun though).

 

[rsabo]

I know Weird Al has some stuff that if you play backwards, you hear a message. Play "I Remember Larry" backwards, and you hear "You have a lot of free time on your hands". I think there's something on his latest album too.

 

[redshifter]

http://www.backmaskonline.com/mp3.html
lots of samples here

 

[trains are bad]

How do you play a record backwards? Can turntables switch directions?

 

[NightWoundsTime]

Nope it's all manaually done AFAIK. Of course you'll destroy any needle and probably the record so don't do it. Any decent computer sound editor has a reverse function that will let you hear all those messages just fine.

"My Sweet Satan". In Stairway to Heaven. This is the only part of it I can make out but people have claimed it's a whole poem that's recorded backwards.

 

[Twombly]

Y'all remember this one, right?

 

[AdamWill]

"To win the game you must kill me, John Romero"...

uh, sorry.

 

[Rock&Roll Ninja]

Just heard one at work from The Bloodhound Gang: "Wake up devil child and eat chef boyardee beefaroni".

PS: Does anybody have a scan of an old Doonesbury cartoon where they find a Satanic riddle in a Billy Joel song (has something to do with bologna)?

 

[androgeny]

I was fortunate enough to take a "History of Rock Music" class in college. We spoke at length about backwards masking, and it's really funny what some people will believe is in certain songs. Our professor let us hear a piece of "Hotel California" backwards. It was nonsense. Then he gave us a lecture on what people have THOUGHT they heard in the track.. Then he played the track. Because we had been told what to hear, it was there. If you can find songs that have claimed to hold satanic messages/verses, try listening to them without knowing exactly what you're supposed to be hearing.

The hidden track on Opeth's Deliverance CD is pretty awesome, if nobody's reversed that one yet.

One of the coolest "tricks" I've ever heard is on a Nine Inch Nails single (Further Down the Spiral). On CD players where you can hear what you're fastforwarding through, you can very clearly hear "erase me" over and over again as you fastforward through the song. Extremely cool. Unfortunately, it's hard to find a CD player that will fastforward at an acceptable rate to hear the track properly. Most are too fast.

Has anyone listened to the very quiet portion of Tool's "Ticks & Leeches"? There's some backwards masking going on there but I'm too lazy to record, amp, and reverse it.

 

[Svperstar]

Hey Marilyn Manson talks backwards in almost every single one of his songs so if you feel like doing some reversals have at it

I always said if I were a musician I would have backwards talking that said things like "Wait till you are married to have sex, do well in school, eat vegtables" just for the hell of it.

 

[aphex_tom_9]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Twombly Y'all remember this one, right?

mmm i love aphex twin

 

[Aman]

Quote:

"My Sweet Satan". In Stairway to Heaven. This is the only part of it I can make out but people have claimed it's a whole poem that's recorded backwards.

It's not. As Wikipedia says, people can't hear a damned thing unless somebody told them what to listen for first. The mind hears what it wants, but Led Zeppelin had absolutely no intention in depicting a message in Stairway to Heaven when playing the song backwards. Robert Plant himself has said this is a completely false accusation. The mixing and mastering engineer has also spoken out against these claims.

There are groups who have done this intentionally (like Pink Floyd), but Led Zeppelin is not one of them.

By the way, that's a really cool link you posted about Aphex Twin, Twombly! I've always loved his music, and now I freakin' envy the guy! I can't even begin to imagine how he was able to craft such intricately-detailed images into a spectrogram!

 

[Rock&Roll Ninja]

I must have listened to "Stairway" backwards 50 times, I have never heard anything intelligable on it. Even played forwards it largely gibberish.