Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - Presenting: Twenty Thousand Hertz

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

When Satanic Panic ripped through America, rock music was in the crosshairs. Could songs contain secret backwards messages urging children to take drugs and worship the devil? This special episode is from Twenty Thousand Hertz, a podcast all about the rich world of sound. Follow Twenty Thousand Hertz wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.20k.org/ This episode mentions death by suicide. If you are suffering emotional distress or having suicidal thoughts, support is available - for example, from the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US, or the Samaritans in the UK on 116 123See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Nations collapsing, ideologies clashing, and ordinary men and women caught in the storm. Hi, I'm Ray Harris Jr. of the History of World War II podcast, and we'll cover the battles that shaped the war from the deserts of North Africa to the frozen forests of the Ardennes, because history isn't just names and dates. It's people, choices, and consequences at world war II podcast.net. A warning, this episode will contain a mention of suicide. If you're suffering with suicidal thoughts, support is available. For example, from 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US or the Samaritans in the UK. In the 1980s, satanic panic ripped through America as listeners to cautionary tales well know from our episode, demonising Dungeons. and dragons. But tabletop role-playing games weren't the only thing spreading alarm. So too was rock music. Were musicians slipping in secret messages? Convincing young children to take

drugs and worship the devil. Messages that could be decoded only if you played the music backwards? 20,000 Hertz is a brilliant podcast all about sound. And they've explored the bizarre history and science around this rock music hysteria. So I'm going to hand over to them for this episode. Sir, I know the same and so I see, no, the same and soleroy. I want to take you back to 1985. Tragedy occurs in Reno, Nevada. Two young men attempt to take their lives together.

one of them dies instantly and three years later the other dies from complications related to the attempt but their parents aren't convinced the young men acted on their own the night of the tragedy they listened to this song

this song this is the Judas Priest cover of the Spooky Tooth song Better by you, better than me in 1990 the young men's family sued Judas Priest over this song. The prosecution against Judas Priest made a big claim.

They said secret messages in the song encouraged them to take their lives. And the only way to hear these messages was to play the record backwards. Listen carefully. Did you hear the words, I shot my demons dead when I'm with you? Here it is again.

Adding Adding secret backwards messages and music wasn't anything new. Even before the so-called satanic panic of the 80s and 90s, people had been playing recorded sounds backwards since the invention of the phonograph. The ability to capture and preserve sound also gave people the ability to manipulate it. That's Brian Garden.

Brian wrote about the history of backmasking for Atlas Obscura. When people talk about backmasking in the audio world, it's generally considered a deliberate recording process where a sound, whether it's an instrument or a voice, is recorded and played backward and then placed somewhere into the forward mix of a song. Sometimes that can be obvious. You're hearing a song and then you hear some sort of weird garbled reverse version, you can kind of make it out.

Sometimes it's more hidden in a track. But that's the basic idea of backmasking. The earliest example of backmasking in popular music comes in the early 60s from a group called The Eligables, but their most famous recording has no backmasking in it. That's right. The Eligables, who performed the Gilligan's Island theme song, also had the first backmasking hit.

In the late 50s, they recorded this song, called Car Trouble. It's about a boy who's taking out a girl on a date in his car. During the song, there are two instances of what sound like really garbled yelling. The first instance is the girlfriend's father. Supposedly the message is now, look at here, cats. stop running these records backwards. Let's hear that moment with the dad yelling again.

But this time, backwards. Now look at here, Kat. Stop running these records backwards. After the girlfriend's dad yells, the boy and the girl go on their date. When they try to come back, the boy's car won't start. They have to walk home, show up late, and dad yells again. The song says,

Didn't I tell you to get my daughter back by 1030, you bum? Didn't I tell you to get my daughter back by 1030, you bum? A few years after car trouble, it was the Beatles who really brought backmasking to the forefront of music culture. The Beatles were recording 1966's Revolver. The idea for backmasking made its way into the song rain. If you listen to it all the way through, there's sort of this ending coda.

And here's that coda. And it's just basically a reverse of the first line of the song. And here's that coda played in reverse. Bands were actually. legitimately doing this. They were inserting messages. Often they were just reversed lyrics in their own songs. But in general, fans of rock and roll music were aware of this,

at least the sort of geeky audiophile ones. So far, this all sounds pretty tame. But it was this next song that was the spark that ignited the initial flames of panic. Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine. In 1969, there was a radio DJ named Russ Gibb, and he gets a phone call from a student at the Eastern Michigan University, and the student claims that there's this rumor about Paul McCartney.

He's been dead, actually, and replaced by some strange doppelganger, Paul McCartney, who looks and sounds just like him, but is not the real Paul McCartney. Oh, no. The caller tells Gibb to basically play the Beatles song, Revolution No. 9, backward. Gibb then hears the phrase, Turn me on, dead man, turn me on, dead man, turn me on the man, turn me on the man, turn me on the month, turn me on the month, honey on the month. So, Gibb freaks out and begins telling all of his listeners about what he calls sort of

this great Beatles cover up, and more and more people start listening for clues, and lo and behold, they found them, including there was another. alleged backmask message, Paul is the dead man, miss him, miss him, miss him. And that was in the song, I'm so tired. The Dead Paul messages found by Beatles fans sound stranger and subtler than the ones in rain or car trouble. Many people, including the Beatles, said that's because they're wasn't actual backmasking. They didn't mean to do it. Keep in mind, this was at a time when people were already worried about subliminal messages.

There was this renewed interest in subliminal manipulation, and this is largely the result of books. They claimed basically that the general public was being manipulated by ad agencies. The idea was that hidden messages could get into your subconscious. Once planted there, they could influence the way you think. Supposedly certain images would be inserted, you know, on the front box of cigarettes, or you could make out naked women in the bubbles in a gin ad in a magazine. These subliminal manipulations were not limited to visuals.

Many believed these backwards messages in songs could also control the way people think and act. To be more blunt, many people believed that, backmasking could make you worship the devil. There'd always been this idea that rock and roll was the devil's music, and once certain conservative pastors found out about this, this gave them sort of an opportunity to listen to these things, and I guess in some cases they literally could hear the voice of the devil. What these pastors found shocked them.

Here's a clip from the Praise the Lord show. In it, Pastor Paul Crouch and his wife Jan listen as their son, Paul Jr., plays Led Zeppelin's stairway to heaven, backwards. All right, I'll slow this down a little bit. Listen for, here's to my sweet Satan. Do you all hear that? And it wasn't just Led Zeppelin.

Satanic messages were supposedly hidden all over rock album. Here's a backwards version of Electric Light Orchestra's El Dorado. Listen for this message. He is the nasty one. Christ, you're infernal. It is said, we're dead men. And here's the backwards version of Hotel California by the Eagles. The message this time is, Satan.

Hadam, he organized his own religion. Yeah, Slate the Haddam, beyond that, here's the band Sticks proclaiming, Satan moves through our voices in the backwards version of the song Snowblind. Apparently, there are examples of this all over 70s and 80s rock music. The Praise the Lord Show wasn't the only one. finding these hidden subversive messages. There was a famous pastor Gary Greenwald

who actually started a sort of backmasking tour where he would travel around the United States and even went up to Canada and would hold basically what are record listening parties where he would play these things for the audience pointing out every time what the backmasked message supposedly was and people would freak out. Often they would be followed by album burning

parties or whatever. He also had a television show briefly where he would do these sort of things as well. Is it possible that this could be preparing us subconsciously through backward masking to accept a child that is coming that is none other than the son of Satan? Let me play that for you backwards and you tell me who the child is. Listen carefully. By this point, many had gone into full-blown satanic panic. So, obviously, the next step was for the government to put a stop to it. Starting in the early 80s, you saw an uptick in actual legislation aimed at combating backmasking. A member of the California State Assembly,

created a panel to investigate satanic messages in Stairway to Heaven and other songs. He gathered all these witnesses. He gathered a person who purportedly was a neuroscientist who sort of explained how these backward messages were influencing or could influence kids who didn't necessarily even play the albums backwards. And then it kind of just snowballed.

The call for local legislation turned into a cry for national laws. Now, it was time for the U.S. Congress to get to, involved. People were actively introducing legislation and trying to pass bills that, if not outlawed the practice, mandated warning signs on all the albums that supposedly had these nefarious messages on them. Rock bands and producers continued to claim that backwards messages were completely and totally unintentional. Stix's James Young called the whole idea of satanic backmasking a hoax, perpetrated by religious zealots, Led Zepplin's record label. issued one statement based on the back-masking controversy,

which was, our turntables only rotate in one direction. So when tragedy struck in Reno, Nevada in 1985, the music industry was already under a microscope for back-masking. And even though none of these laws actually passed, the Judas Priest trial in 1990 had everyone in the music industry watching. If the band lost, they would set a precedent that anyone could be sued for backwards combinations of sounds creating an unintentional message.

We'll get that verdict, plus the brain science behind backmasking after this. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

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Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-8-4-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-8-4-I-Hart. Do you ever wish your office felt better? BuzzySpace designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus

or a collaborative space to brainstorm, BuzzySpace has you covered. Head to Buzzy.com. space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I-D-S-Space. In the late 80s, the satanic panic was in full swing. Parents, government officials, churches, and even some scientists believe that backwards messages in rock songs influenced young people in terrible ways. Then, in 1990, Judas Priest were being sued over him.

hidden commands in their songs, which allegedly influenced two people to take their lives. If they lost this case, it would mean that any band could be held liable for the actions resulting from their supposedly hidden messages. In a 108-page written decision, Judge Jerry Carr Whitehead found that Judas Priest and CBS Records are not liable in causing the deaths. The judge also ruled that there is no proof of backwards masking on the album, and in any case, no scientific proof that backwards masking can be perceived or affect conduct. In the end, Judas Priest and the music industry were cleared of all charges.

And no matter if it's intentional or accidental, they proved backmasking can't control your thoughts. Still, backmasking had become a really, really big deal. Some musicians today still use it to play intentional messages in their songs, albeit usually to poke fun at the whole controversy. Here's an example from Weird Al Yankovic's, I remember Larry. See if you can understand what he's saying. So what Weird I was saying was, wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.

Here it is one more time. Despite the music, industry's efforts, many people still hear unintentional backmasking messages. Here's an ironically titled song from Cheap Trick called Gonna Raise Hell. See if you can make out the message. You can hear a huge difference between the two. Weird Al's message is clear, and Cheap Trick's message is much harder to understand. Supposedly, they're saying, you know Satan holds the keys to the lock. Here it is again. I think is pretty evident in the difference you hear between songs that have intentional

backmasking and songs that don't necessarily. That's Ashley Hamer, the managing editor for Curiosity.com, and co-host of the Curiosity Daily podcast. Ashley wrote about backmasking for the website. I'm actually also a freelance musician. I have an undergrad and a master's in jazz performance. So she's uniquely qualified for this particular topic. When it's intentional, you hear a very clear voice saying something. But when you hear these unintentional ones, it sounds like a ghost, like someone who can't quite talk.

They're trying to speak through a veil or something. And the same is true when you turn them backward. Here's that backwards message in Weird Al's I remember Larry again, but this time played forward. It sounds a lot like those unintentional backwards messages. It sounds satanic. It sounds ghostly. I don't think there is a human on earth who can actually talk like that. Bob Garcia of A&M Records once said, it must be the devil putting these messages on the records because no one here knows how to do it. When you see the kinds of backmasking that has become famous, the inadvertent backmasking, it's pretty simple and it doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Like, they're not really things that people would normally say. Like, Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. Here's to My Sweet Satan. It only has one two-syllable word in it. Everything else is just a single syllable. And that's how a lot of these supposed. backmasking messages are. They're very simple. They're just syllable by syllable. And a single syllable can sound like a lot of different things. Even if the words are simple, these unintentional noises

sound to us like language. This concept is called peridolia. It basically means that us humans really like to find patterns, sometimes in places where there are no patterns. It's the same reason why you might see a face on Mars or a bunny rabbit in a cloud. Our minds are constantly on the lookout to make sense of the world around us. Sometimes we turn things that don't actually make sense into things that do. The big thing with backmasking is the idea that we really love language. It's really important for us to be able to communicate. It is basically what keeps us alive.

If we can't tell each other our needs, if we can't get mates, If we can't tell each other that, oh, I found this food over here, let's go get it. We're not really going to survive. Our brain is hardwired to find messages. We're so good at picking out language that sometimes we do it by accident. That's because our brains process information in two different ways, bottom up and top down. Bottom up processing is basically when you build things from the ground up. You have a texture or a color or a shape, and you figure out what it is from all.

of the details. But top-down processing uses kind of that higher order thinking where you're thinking about context and what you've experienced before and what you kind of know about the situation to form a judgment. That's how we interpret language. Our brains particularly hear language if another person primes us by telling us what to listen for. Here's an example from Queens, another one bites the dust, played backwards. I'm not yet going to tell you, you what it is. If you didn't know what to listen for, you probably heard gibberish. Here it is again. Now listen for the message, it's fun to smoke marijuana. It's fun to smoke marijuana. It's fun to smoke marijuana.

When someone tells you that a bunch of noise actually is saying it's fun to smoke marijuana, you're going to hear it because your brain is using that higher order information that has already told you that this is language to hear the thing that you're told to hear. And an early 80 study in the Journal of Science backed up Ashley's point. They divided the participants into three groups, and the first group was just asked to describe what they heard. They weren't told anything else. They heard something like this.

And most of those people said they heard things like science fiction sounds or animal cries. Researchers played people sign wave speech. It's real speech, but it's artificially degraded so that any evidence of a message is completely lost, and there are only certain frequencies left over. So if you were to listen to this without any context, it would just sound like noise, which is kind of what backmasking sounds like. The second group was told that they would hear an actual sentence that was produced by a computer, and they were asked to write down what that sentence said.

Okay, now that you know this is human speech, let's hear it again. See if you can pick out any words. And again. And actually, most of those people figured out at least a few of the words correctly. Because again, this sine wave speech, it had been real speech before, and it was just degraded. As soon as those people knew that it was a sentence, they were able to describe what some of these words were. And then the third group was actually told what the sentence said, and all of them said that they could hear it.

The distorted message you heard earlier said, Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo. Now take a listen. Here's the clean version. Mama was kept in a cage at the zoo. So it's easier for your brain to hear a message, if someone else primes it, like I just did. So if priming is a thing, maybe backwards messages

have the ability to influence our thinking. Well, as it turns out, accidental and intentional backwards messages have no control over our brains. People have done studies on this. They've actually taken backward audio that is real and played it for people, and then they've given them a test

that should elicit some sort of recognition if a seed was planted for a particular word or something, that was played backward, and it just doesn't work. People who hear backward messages have no idea what those things are saying. It doesn't communicate any subliminal message to anybody. Backwards messages and songs can't hypnotize us into bad behavior, but they can make us laugh,

like this backmast thought on the B-52's Detour Through Your Mind. I buried my parake in the backyard. Oh, no, you're playing. Record backwards. Watch out. You might ruin your needle. Backmasking can also be used artistically, like in Missy Elliott's Work It. And here's that same section reversed.

And here's that same section reversed. It's your permit if it's why I had it and reverse it. Many backwards messages are comments on the satanic panic of the 70s and 80s. Electric Light Orchestra played to their evil reputation by adding backmasking to their song, Fire on High. This was in response to accusations of hiding satanic messages in previous releases.

Here's that song in reverse. The music is reversible, but time. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back. You might think the Judas Priest verdict was the reason backmasking outrage ended, but actually, it was technology. The whole Satanism scare in backward music kind of died down when CDs became more popular

because you can't really play CDs backwards, so people weren't as worried about it anymore. For a couple decades, we didn't hear many backmasked messages at all, intentional or otherwise, but now it's starting to come back, thanks to the Internet. It's kind of ramping back up now that there's so much digital music software where you can actually play things backward again. More recently, here's a track by 21 pilots called Nico and the Niners,

and they put backmasking in the intro. Here's a snippet of what it sounds like when played forward. And here it is reversed. The poetic message says, We are banditos. You will leave Dima and Head True East. We denounce vialism. And of course with the intentional backmasking comes the unintentional.

This time it's Lady Gaga praising the devil in the backwards version of paparazzi. The internet has revealed this message, evil save us. These stars above, above, we model it on the arts of Lucifer. It wouldn't be this big It wouldn't be this big of course of love It wouldn't be this big of a deal if music wasn't so integral to our culture and the way we interact with each other

and the way we process our feelings and our thoughts about the world. The idea that someone is putting in secret messages to hijack the way that we interact with our music is so scary because it's so important to us. The facts say the satanic panic over backmasking was much ado about nothing. The devil worshipping messages were unintentional and ineffective. I mean, how many people do you know that listen to Led Zeppelin or Judas Priest

that now actively worship the devil all the time? It was really only the rise of CDs that stopped the backmasking outrage. But with that in mind, now that I think about it, has anyone ever really third? gone through all of the songs over the past 20 years of digital music, at least a check for backwards messages? We have a lot to sort through. Maybe all of the backwards messages we haven't found yet have been controlling our every thought and feeling.

20,000 Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the studios of de facto sound, a sound design team dedicated to making television, film, and games sound incredible. Find out more at de facto sound.com. This episode was written and produced by James Intracasso. And me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Sneebly. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Bayjan. And Nick Spradlin.

Thanks to Brian Gardner and Ashley Hamer. Ashley is the managing editor of Curiosity.com and the co-host of the award-winning Curiosity Daily podcast, which comes out every week. weekday. She also plays saxophone with the band Fuzz. That's FUZZZ if you'd like to find them on Apple or Spotify. You're actually listening to their song Hang Time right now. Finally, I want you to go out and find backmasked messages and popular songs and send it to me. Find a track, play it backwards, and tweet what you hear at 20K org on Twitter. If it's funny

and relatively clean, I'll retweet it. Let's start a panic. And so we're asking it. Nice to be. I am, that. This is so happy. There are plenty more episodes, full of human stories and lovingly crafted soundscapes. Everything from the science of cat and dog communication to the history of corporate musicals. And how Beethoven kept composing even after losing his history.

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