Backmasking

I love backmasking. Now with digital music files and home editing software, there’s no more spinning the vinyl record backward on a turntable. Satan, apparently, has gone binary. Enter “backmasking” into Google and nearly 9,000 sites pop up.

The whole stupid Christian coalition making what are really phonetic reversals into messages from Satan just cracks me up. I remember seeing televangelists wail about this crap. Of course, since I was/am a huge fan of KISS, there was the inevitable “Knights in Satan’s Service” tag. Funny enough, though, KISS never had a song that was backmasked either intentionally or not.

Wikipedia has a great collection of information on intended and unintended backmasking. Even more fun is Jeff Milner’s site, which offers many tracks to play forward and backward for your listening pleasure. Most of these are famous backmasking tracks that either I read about or actually heard back in the day.

Hearing “My Sweet Satan” as a phonetic reversal of “Stairway to Heaven” takes me back to high school and guys who were talented enough to splice the cassette tape or record the album and then “hand roll” it backward to try to recreate the sound.

I wish some of the newer metal bands would bring this practice back just to screw with the crazy religious right. I’d have all kinds of intentional backmasking on an album. All of it would be just like Christian rock band Petra’s famous intentional backmask, which says, “What are you looking for the devil for, when you ought to be looking for the Lord?”

Heh. That’d show ‘em.