Satanic Lyrics and Backmasking

[If you are just joining the thread of this journal, please click on the "about" link for information about how this "Celebration Rock" blog came to be.]

I knew listeners were enjoying and taking seriously “Celebration Rock” because of all the invitations I received to speak to youth groups and conferences around the country. A young listener in Durham, NC arranged a visit to his church and a local TV producer asked to videotape part of my presentation and do an interview. Since I attested to the positive lyrics of contemporary hit songs and popular album cuts, choosing to dwell on the stories, feelings, and expressions of musicians with a “message,” the producer wanted to balance the program with a local pastor/evangelist who thought rock music was the work of the devil. Not only were the words damaging to young minds, but even the very beat, he argued, was injurious to the soul.

When the copy of the final program arrived for my viewing back home in Richmond, there were some excerpts from my presentation with the youth, and then the edited give and take between the separate interviews done with the local preacher and me. I was encouraging youth to listen to the lyrics of the songs, appreciate the lines that helped them grow in understanding and faith, but also show caution in casually accepting every “truth” espoused in the music. The other minister warned teenagers and parents alike that rock music was born in the devil’s workshop and he offered example after example of songs that encouraged drug use, sexual promiscuity, and satanic worship.

In the video, for all the positive and uplifting things I said about the music of Billy Joel, Kansas, the Alan Parsons Project, Phil Collins, and the Police, and I was was surprised to see the devil looking over my shoulder as I spoke to the youth group. For behind me on the wall of the youth center at the church was a huge blue devil from floor to ceiling! I was in Durham, of course, and the kids were huge fans of the Duke Blue Devils. Still, I thought the visual was rather ironic.

To be sure, the criticism of some artists and their music was warranted. But the hysterical critics who urged the burning of every “rock and roll” record got far more press than they deserved, and almost every time I spoke to youth groups, someone would ask about “backmasking” (sometimes called backward masking). Were some rock goups embedding their albums with satanic messages to recruit listeners into the devil’s clutches? My first response was that, first of all, I didn’t believe in a personal embodiment of evil in a figure called “Satan.” Second, I’m sure some groups were playing with the technology in order to toy with their public, or experiment with sound, or get some negative press (which sells music). The Beatles were not the first, nor the last, to backmask. And third, the effects of such technological wizardry were (are) highly debated. I challenged the youth group to try the subliminal trick of not studying for their next exam in school, but play a recording of their French vocabulary or the periodic chart as they slept at night, to see how much they trust learning that way. And that’s frontwards, I reminded them. How much do you suppose backmasking is going to sink into your consciousness?

Eventually I took a recording of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” which allegedly contained backmasking, and using a studio turntable with a cue-friendly stylus (don’t try this at home, kids), I played the record backward. That sucker is seven or eight minutes long, and I wasn’t interested in getting a Master’s thesis out of this experiment, so I played the thing long enough to hear a line that sounded something like, “I love you Satan.” Here’s the thing: I could have played a recording of the Sermon on the Mount backward, and if the idea was to listen for something “satanic,” I’d probably have found some sounds that I could make into something offensive, simply because of the the “power of suggestion.”

[In my first radio days in Richmond at the old WRFK, we began the broadcast day with a recorded meditation entitled "Be Still and Know." The first words on the record were "Be still..." When records are cued up, the stylus is placed on the track, the record is twisted backward until sound is audible, and then forward and back again until you are confident that when you start the turntable, the first sound is exactly what you want it to be...not hiss or the fifth word into the track. I would cue up "Be Still" and the backward sound was akin to "Whoop shit."  How many people do you suppose headed to their bathrooms on hearing the backmasked suggestion that they needed to "go" just as the WRFK broadcast day began? I rest my case.]

My argument continued at those youth group meetings. Suppose Led Zeppelin intentionally decided to add that backmasked message, “I love you Satan.” They would have to say the phrase and then play it backward and see what “forward” sounds it made ,and then devise an English lyric to fit their song, keeping meaning, rhyme, and meter in line with the total lyric. (OK, maybe this isn’t as far fetched as I meant it to be, given their “bustle in your hedgerow.”)

The main point for the youth groups I spoke to was the value in listening to lyrics they could plainly hear, and not worrying about alleged backmasked messages they couldn’t hear. “Stairway to Heaven” was a good example of a lyric worth dissecting. The last verse:

And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.
When all are one and one is all
To be a rock and not to roll.

What does it mean to “buy” the stairway to heaven? That’s worth talking about. (I once performed a wedding for a Richmond ad agency executive and a TV exec. I thought it was to be just the three of us in the church chapel, a quiet “walk-in” wedding. But that day she brought a singer-guitarist to add some music, and without clearing it with me she had chosen “Stairway to Heaven” as the song played after the vows. Imagine my chagrin when the last line was sung, “And she’s buy – y – ing the stairway to heaven.” Did the bride not hear what the song was saying? Oh well…”)

To sum up, I didn’t buy into the idea that some satanic force was warping the consciousness of all who listened and danced to rock music. I did continue to urge parents to listen to their kids’ music, to read the lyrics off the record jackets not subversively, but in dialogue with their children. And in all those conversations with youth, in church groups and seminars, but also in personal conversations one-on-one, I advocated listening to the words of favorite songs, considering how faith might address the stories and feelings expressed in the music, and using music as a bridge to understanding and celebrating life.

As I write this, I realize how totally out of touch I am with today’s music. There was a time, 22 years’ worth of time, that I knew the music and the artists, and had wonderful conversations with people about the culture of rock. No more. I left radio for a small church in Vermont and within a few months, the most popular music and musicians were foreign to me. I wonder who is out there now to listen, to interpret, and to guide listeners in the messages sung by today’s artists?

Still to come: stories about my brush with Dio and my admiration for Rush (the group, not the humorous radio talk entertainer).