Michael Shermer talks about why people believe strange things, including the belief that there are secret messages in popular music when it’s played backwards.
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Category: backmasking
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Backmasking in Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi
By popular request, from Lady Gaga’s debut album The Fame, comes a little clip out of track number three, Paparazzi reversed.
Personally, I can’t hear it even with the “reverse lyrics” showing. To me, Lucifer sounds more like moose-em-mouw, but the emails keep coming. For the record, I’m a complete skeptic.
After watching The L Magazine’s The Evolution of the Modern Blockbuster Movie (via) I got thinking that I had never actually read the famous Batman – The Dark Knight Returns comic series (wikipedia entry) from 1986 that was used as a rough basis for Tim Burton’s Batman (1989).
I remember hearing about Frank Miller’s, soon to be a collector’s item, The Dark Knight Returns and had always wanted to read it, but I was a bit young for its graphic content and besides, I didn’t exactly have any disposable income for comics when I was 7.
However, as I read it this evening, I came across a page that I found pretty interesting. On page 89 of book two, the comic makes a reference to backmasking in Stairway to Heaven. I’m posting it here to show just one more way the legend crept into popular culture. The relevant panels after the jump.
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Pareidolia
The Best of Wikipedia is a continually updated collection of some of the most interesting Wikipedia articles. Here’s one from yesterday:
Pareidolia – Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. There have been many instances of perceptions of religious imagery and themes—in 1978, a New Mexican woman found that the burn marks on a tortilla she had made appeared similar to the traditional western depiction of Jesus Christ’s face. Thousands of people came to see the framed tortilla. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.
(via Best of Wikipedia)
Despite the continued media frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson’s death, I have to admit I’m kind of over it.
However, I felt inspired to look for the “backmasking” message known to be in the song “Beat It”. So I now present, for your skeptical analysis, a new addition to my backmasking page, Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”.
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First Moon Landing 1969
Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon and he did it forty-years ago today. He spoke the now legenday words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Played backwards, “small step for man”, sounds like wait, I won’t ruin it for you, give it a try below:
Play forwards
Forward:’a small step for a man’
Play in Reverse
Reverse: ‘Man will spacewalk.’
Not that it means anything, I just thought someone might find that an interesting coincidence.
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Teaching of Psychology
Tom Stafford, a member of the Adaptive Behaviour Research Group in the Department of Psychology at University of Sheffield, recently presented the keynote speech at the annual conference of the Association for the Teaching of Psychology at Lincoln in the UK. He talked a little bit about the priming that can occur when you load up my backmasking site. He was kind to present the topic using this slide.
Thanks Tom! you made my day.
Research Digest wrote up an interesting summary of Tom’s keynote talk.
A classic SNL moment: Chris Farley interviews Paul McCartney.
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Backmasking Text File
Here’s an interesting little text file from 1983 that Jason Scott has in this vast archive of BBS files, backmask.txt, that delves into the history, technology, and social aspects of backmasking.
From the text file by William Poundstone:
TV programs such as PRAISE THE LORD and THE 700 CLUB have propagated rumors of a satanic plot in the recording industry, no less, in which various albums conceal “backward-masked” demonic murmurings. If THAT sounds too spacey to be taken seriously, consider that it was the fundamentalist groups who were behind House Resolution 6363, a bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert K. Dornan (R., Calif.) in 1982 to label all suspect records: “WARNING: THIS RECORD CONTAINS BACKWARD MASKING THAT MAKES A VERBAL STATEMENT WHICH IS AUDIBLE WHEN THIS RECORD IS PLAYED BACKWARD AND WHICH MAY BE PERCEPTIBLE AT A SUBLIMINAL LEVEL WHEN THIS RECORD IS PLAYED FORWARD.”
Many of the original rumours I heard about backmasking when I was a kid are in this file. It’s interesting to note that the claims of what exactly each songs says when played backwards has continued to evolve over the years.
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In the Boston Globe
An article in the Boston Globe published today highlighted my backmasking page.
Remember that guy in high school who was always trying to tell you about the satanic messages hidden in “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin (below) if you played it backward? Turns out he was right. Or so says Jeff Milner, a graphic designer from Alberta, Canada, who has not only posted snippets of the song, and several others, in reverse, but also transcribed the alleged backward lyrics. His findings: “If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a spring clean for the May queen” translates to “Oh here’s to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan.” The message is surprisingly clear on “Stairway,” but less so on songs like “Baby One More Time.”
See the full article.