Backmasking

Play it backwards, hear the confession. The panic was real even when the messages weren't.

On a December night in 1985, in Reno, Nevada, two young men, twenty-year-old James Vance and eighteen-year-old Raymond Belknap, spent hours drinking, smoking marijuana, and listening to the heavy metal band Judas Priest. Then they walked to a church playground with a shotgun. Belknap put the barrel under his chin and died instantly. Vance followed, survived with catastrophic facial injuries, and lived three more years before dying. Their families went looking for a reason. And what they believed they found was a voice hidden in the music. Backmasking is the technique of recording a sound or message so it can only be heard when a track is played in reverse. Artists have done it deliberately and playfully since the 1960s. But by the early 1980s, in the middle of America's 'Satanic Panic,' a belief took hold that rock bands were burying evil commands in their records, messages your conscious mind couldn't hear but your subconscious supposedly obeyed. Preachers held record-burning rallies. State legislatures held hearings. And the Vance and Belknap families sued Judas Priest, alleging the song 'Better By You, Better Than Me' contained the hidden phrase 'do it.' Here's what's documented. The case, Vance v. Judas Priest, went to trial in Reno in 1990. The band, including singer Rob Halford, showed up in court and picked the claims apart. The judge ruled the band was not liable, finding that 'the scientific research presented does not establish that subliminal stimuli... may precipitate conduct of this magnitude,' and noting that both young men had long histories of family violence, drug abuse, and emotional trouble that made them high suicide risks. The 'do it' sound, the defense showed, was an accidental artifact, the mix of Halford exhaling and a guitar. So here's where it gets strange. The trial became one of the most thorough public examinations ever conducted of whether hidden messages actually work. Expert witnesses testified that subliminal effects, where they exist at all, are modest, limited to the flicker of recognizing a single word under lab conditions. Nothing remotely powerful enough to override a person's will and drive them to suicide. It's the same conclusion the science reached about James Vicary's 'eat popcorn' Subliminal Messaging hoax decades earlier: the fear was enormous, the effect was tiny. But here's the part most people don't know: your brain is genuinely wired to find messages in noise. Play any long recording backward and search hard enough and you'll 'hear' words, because you expect to. That same pattern-hunting instinct powered another legend of hidden audio clues, the belief that the Beatles buried proof of Paul McCartney's secret death in backward loops on their records, the story known as Paul Is Dead. On our map, Backmasking sits downstream of Subliminal Messaging, the same fear of hidden persuasion now spun in reverse, and right beside Paul Is Dead, where reversed audio stopped being satanic and became a treasure hunt.