Saturday, September 05, 2015

One Thing Is Clear: Backmasking In Secular Rock Music Is Always Negative


This is so much fun.  When I was a kid, I discovered "backmasking" - it was because of a list in a book that had "proof" that Paul McCartney was dead, that the other Beatles left "clues" in songs & in album designs to tell the world about it.  (In case you've never heard this, you can read about it here & here.)  I was completely floored by the backwards segue from "I'm So Tired" to "Blackbird" which seemed to have John Lennon say, "Paul is dead, miss him, miss him."  & then of course, "number nine" backwards is "turn me on, dead man"!  Truth be told, I was a little freaked out by it all.  I took the book - it was called "The Book Of Rock Lists" - & hid it downstairs for a while, afraid it had some kind of weird dark magic.

(When I was a kid, I dearly wanted to believe in magic.  Have I told you my astral projection story?  Remind me to tell you my astral projection story one day.)

It was only later when I found out that some fundamentalist Christians were freaking out about backmasking as somehow the work of satanic forces, which didn't affect me as much because I wasn't really raised Christian, didn't really believe necessarily in Christian mythology, & by that point I was pretty disillusioned by most supernatural stuff.  The Christian trappings made it seem even more unlikely to me.

Besides, if the messages played backwards were so obvious, why did the person presenting the messages have to tell you what you were supposed to hear before they played it?  It's because they needed you to expect to hear what they told you to hear.  Mostly it's just paranoid nonsense used to justify a social agenda.

That doesn't mean it's not fun to listen to!  I found this website which has one of these tapes, the tape booklet of which is above.  The straight face with which this is presented makes it the more ridiculous.  But except for the boring witnessing at the end, the "26 Amazing Examples Of Backward Messages In Rock Music" is pretty entertaining.  Black Oak Arkansas has never felt so relevant!

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