Take the Backward Masking Challenge! Jacob Aranza’s Backward Masking Unmasked: Backward Satanic Messages of Rock and Roll Exposed

Backward masking, in case you don’t know, is when a musician thinks of an evil satanic thing to say, and then somehow writes and records a seemingly unrelated song lyric that when reversed gives this evil message. The story goes that if you play Stairway to Heaven backwards, it says “my sweet satan”. There’s a part of Judas Priest’s cover of Better by You that apparently sounds like an order to, “Do it!” when played backwards. This message apparently caused a couple of teenagers to make a suicide pact in 1985. One of Ozzy’s songs apparently tells the listener to get their gun.

It’s hard for me to understand how somebody like Ozzy Osbourne would have the intelligence to write a lyric that could run both ways. Don’t get me wrong, I like Ozzy but he’s no Weird Al. (Not only did Weird Al write an entire song of palindromes he also put backwards messages into 2 of his songs.)

So this idea suggests that a bunch of drugged up 70s rockstars were far smarter than they really were, but it also suggests that the fans of this music were so smart that their brains could decode these hidden messages. Seriously, if our brains are smart enough to subconsciously extract backwards words that are intermixed with guitars and drums, wouldn’t we be able to listen to something backwards and then be able to figure out what it said? What kind of evolutionary function would this serve? Here, take the backwards masking challenge!

There’s no sense in digging into this issue too much. The very notion of stadium rock bands attempting to get their fans to kill themselves is ludicrous enough to dismiss this as nonsense. You’d have to be a real moron to take this crap seriously.

Unfortunately, only the first chapter really deals with the backward masking stuff. The explanation given is half-hearted stupid rubbish. The rest of the book is a more general screed on the dangers of rock. This book was actually written before the Judas Priest/Ozzy suicide pact. I watched the Dream Deceivers documentary years ago. It’s truly depressing stuff, and this book probably exacerbated the trauma of the families who were devastated by that tragedy.

Looking through the list of bands at the end of this book is pretty amusing. Bob Larson’s Book of Rock had a very similar list if I remember correctly. They’re mostly inane soft rock groups being painted as depraved Satanists. I’m quite sure that this kind of scaremongering provided the blueprint for bands like Venom and Mercyful Fate. Those guys must have seen this and thought, “That’s a great idea!”

This book was a stupid pile of crap. Keep listening to heavy metal and worshipping the Devil.