Top 10 Songs with Backmasking

No song in history has been as thoroughly turned upside down as Led Zeppelin's 1971 masterpiece. In January 1982, Christian televangelist Paul Crouch delivered a fiery sermon claiming that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had made a pact with evil in their legendary rock song. Crouch let the audience hear a passage from the middle of the song backwards. The innocent lines about a bustle in your hedgerow suddenly sounded eerily like: “Oh here's to my sweet Satan… The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan… He will give those with him 666… There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.” Singer Robert Plant called the accusations completely bizarre: "Who comes up with something like that? You must have a lot of free time to think that someone would deliberately put something like that in a song." Nevertheless, the fragment caused decades of fascination and “Stairway to Heaven” remains the absolute figurehead of backmasking to this day.

The official invention of backmasking in pop music is credited to The Beatles. During the recording sessions of the single “Rain” in 1966, John Lennon accidentally loaded a tape recorder the wrong way around. He was so enchanted by the strange, dragging effect that he left the inverted vocal line at the end of the song, creating the very first conscious backwards pop fragment. Two years later, however, the phenomenon got completely out of hand around the myth that Paul McCartney was killed in a car accident and replaced by a lookalike. Millions of fans meticulously played The White Album backwards in search of clues. In the sound collage “Revolution 9” they heard the spoken text “Number nine” change into “Turn me on, dead man”, while Lennon seemed to mutter at the end of “I'm So Tired”: “Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him…”

What started as a strange theory about hidden messages degenerated in 1990 into one of the most controversial lawsuits in music history. Two American teenagers made a tragic suicide pact on a Nevada playground after hours of listening to the Judas Priest album Stained Class. The relatives sued the British metal band for millions of dollars. According to prosecutors, their cover of “Better by You, Better than Me” included a backwards, subliminal command in which singer Rob Halford shouted “Do it, do it!” would recommend. Halford successfully demonstrated in court that virtually any number looks like words backwards. Anyone who turns the song around will also hear “I asked for a peppermint, I asked for her to get one”. The judge completely acquitted the band of guilt.

The sensual song from the legendary album Purple Rain (1984) ends with a minutes-long whirlwind of rain and wind effects, in which Prince sings backwards with a distorted voice. The hidden text turned out not to be dark, but rather religious: "Hello, how are you? I'm fine, 'cause I know that the Lord is coming soon..." However, it was the explicit text on the forward plate that unleashed a culture war. When Tipper Gore, wife of politician Al Gore, heard her eleven-year-old daughter listening to the song, she founded the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC). That action led directly to the introduction of the well-known black and white 'Parental Advisory' warning sticker.

In addition to deliberate jokes, pop history also has legendary coincidences. When Queen's disco rock hit “Another One Bites the Dust” dominated the worldwide charts in the early 1980s, American televangelists thought they had discovered a secret conspiracy: the British rockers would encourage young people to use drugs through the subconscious. When the chorus is played backwards, Freddie Mercury's vocal line changes with the rhythmic timbre into the remarkable phrase: "It's fun to smoke marijuana." Record company Hollywood Records categorically denied that the band had done this on purpose.

Roger Waters and David Gilmour hid one of the most famous 'easter eggs' in pop history on their monumental masterpiece The Wall (1979). Just before the song “Empty Spaces” transitions into “Young Lust,” a bizarre, mumbling sound is heard in the left audio channel. If you play the vinyl backwards, you hear a crystal clear congratulations from Roger Waters: "Hello, hunters. Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the Funny Farm, Chalfont..." In the background, producer James Guthrie then interrupts him with the announcement that his wife is on the phone, after which Waters hastily cuts off the message.

Even the symphonic pop rockers of Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) did not escape the anathema of American conservatives. Religious groups widely claimed that the song “Eldorado” (1974) contained a hymn to Lucifer backwards. Bandleader Jeff Lynne was so stunned by the accusations that he decided to get back at the critics directly. On the album Face the Music, the instrumental masterpiece “Fire on High” opens with a heavy choir and a deep, inverted voice. If you play the record backwards, you will hear drummer Bev Bevan soberly declare: “The music is the reversible time, but there's no turning back. Start from the one!”

After the release of the legendary album The Number of the Beast (1982), the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden was portrayed by American fundamentalists as dangerous devil worshipers. The group's records were even publicly burned during demonstrations. The band members responded to their next album Piece of Mind with a typically British form of mockery. At the beginning of the song “Still Life” they edited an unintelligible mumble. Played backwards, this turns out to be drummer Nicko McBrain, who, after a few glasses of drink, makes a parody of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin: “What ho said the t'ing with the three 'bonce', do not meddle with things that you don't understand.”

While many rock bands denied that they had dark intentions, the American thrash metal pioneers Slayer did everything they could to create a terrifying atmosphere. The opening track of their second studio album Hell Awaits (1985) begins with an ominous din of growling voices and slow, heavy drums. If you play the intro of more than a minute backwards, the growl turns out to be a repetitive voice that calls out enchantingly: “Join us, join us, join us…”, culminating in a triumphant “Welcome back!”

Who else than parody genius 'Weird Al' Yankovic managed to masterfully ridicule the fuss surrounding hidden messages? On his hit album “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D from 1984, he concluded with “Nature Trail to Hell”, a cheerful parody of the then extremely popular slasher horror films. In the middle of the heyday of the American witch hunt, Yankovic decided to edit a backwards message into the track himself. If you play the song backwards around 3:40, you will hear him chant the nonsensical slogan in a deep, gravelly voice: “Satan eats Cheez Whiz!”